Methods and Tools for Knowledge Exploitation in SOA Systems

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) paradigm delivers methodology to create software systems in a form of interoperable services. Systems designed accordant to this paradigm are composed of services, which are executed on user's demand. Each service is an implementation of a business functionality, which can be used in different business processes. 1) The system that has been built according to the SOA paradigm can combine complex services out of atomic ones. Moreover, in the business process modeling, it is possible to specify which services can be joined and how their elements interact with each other. We are witnessing now the phenomenon of the SOA paradigm gaining a new dimension in SOKU (Service Oriented Knowledge Utilities) that delivers methods for acquisition, processing and integration of knowledge and captures three main notions: service orientation, knowledge and utility. Knowledge services in SOKU brings 'semantic' dimension of the services and utility is directed towards effective and efficient service utilization with an acceptable user satisfaction. The SOKU concept corresponds to the rapidly growing demand for reduction in management costs and increases in the effectiveness of business processes. Because of the complexity of problems arising in SOKU systems, there is a great need for development of representation methods of descriptive and procedural knowledge. Hence, ontologies are employed for representation of knowledge about services and their users. The SOKU approach involves flexible and effective design, implementation, provision and modification of services for many different application areas such as: business, science, society etc. The SOKU approach is a consequence of observable development trends in computer science,