Chapter 14. CONTEXTUAL GENERALIZATION ANALYSIS PROCESS AND MODELING PATTERNS

Contextual generalization is simply the process of widening the functionality and specialty scope of a service by preserving its core attributes and properties. This transformation is designed to broaden a service's spectrum beyond its current dimension by increasing its abstraction level. It is about both amplifying its boundaries and extending its contextual limits by forming a new, larger service. Furthermore, recall that this typing activity should not be focused on manipulating a service's structure. Applying environmental changes, such as alteration to a service ecosystem and modification to messaging configurations, is not what this analysis is interested in. The issues are merely semantic, and the chief goal is service discovery through generalization activities that not only identify new entities but also depict the evolution of a service.

The reader may wonder if the relationship formed between the original service and its abstracted services calls for the construction of a composite structure. Do the resulting products discovered during the contextual generalization process lead to the construction of a specific service formation? The answer to this question is not necessarily affirmative. In fact, this venture is, by and large, not about physical aggregation of services and certainly not about manipulation of service structures. Here the intention is to discover new services and identify semantic ...

Get SOA Modeling Patterns for Service-Oriented Discovery and Analysis now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.