Using Object Role Modeling in a Service-Oriented Data Integration Project

Communication between business and IT experts is challenging, because business requirements are often specified in subjective and vague terms compared to the formality needed for technical implementation. In the service-oriented architectures (SOA) context this issue is especially important, because the value proposition of SOA is based on a business awareness of the systems. In this paper we address this challenge by using the Object Role Modeling (ORM) method in a case study focusing on a service-oriented data integration project. The results of this study indicate that the automatic verbalizations combined with the automatic XML Schema generation of the ORM models could be useful in SOA integration projects to support the collaboration between the business and IT experts. The main concerns that were identified relate to the change management of the ORM models, managing the high level of detail in the models and the workload if no adequate automation is provided.

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