SOA - Service Orientation Applied

However, least is bothered about the degree of understanding when such terminologies are used.  Standard bodies like OASIS are working on the creation of SOA blueprints one of the outcomes which is to arrive at an agreement on such terminologies.

Among all the terminologies the most important and very basic unit of SOA which is service, the definition of which is still unclear or not agreed upon. Apart from the standard bodies, there have been attempts to define what a service is in various groups and communities like SOA community, SOA yahoo groups, Wiki, blogs and glossaries (IBM, BEA).

Since SOA is bringing both business and technology community together and traditionally both communities have had an orthogonal way of thinking about the supporting of business by IT systems, having two definitions for services (as applicable for each community) rather than a common definition, would be an interesting attempt.

So here I give another shot at defining what a service is!

Definition for a Business Analyst

A service is a common activity which when applied under various contexts over different business entities results in a business circumstance that is uniquely distinguishable.

Definition for a Technologist

A service is a self contained, replaceable and reusable module that exhibits high cohesion of functional/semantic relatedness of activities and loosely coupled through multiple standard interfaces and bindings.