SOA Modeling Patterns for Service-Oriented Discovery and Analysis

Chapter 16. CONTEXTUAL EXPANSION ANALYSIS PROCESS AND MODELING PATTERNS

Unlike the service contextual generalization process that addresses the increase of service abstraction levels (discussed in Chapter 14), contextual expansion is simply about extending the territorial aspects of a service to increase its reusability factor and sharing capabilities. The term "territorial" does not necessarily pertain to physical landscapes or concrete boundaries of an enterprise or governance entity. This contextual exercise is a virtual expansion that calls for the growth of a service's offerings and influence beyond its current spectrum to increase and diversify the range of its consumer base. Remember, this contextual growth of a service starts from internal service capabilities and expands beyond the service semantic boundary, spanning across local or enterprise landscapes.

For example, a service can be expanded from a small component to provide solutions to an application's module, from a module to an application's tier, from a single application to multiple applications, from a group of systems to a line of business implementations, from a single business domain to multiple domains, and from cross-organizational operations to serve third-party vendors and partners. Again, this expansion is about broadening the offering power of a service to provide increased solutions to organizational needs by cross-cutting business^[91] or technological concerns. It is also about widening a service's capabilities ...