Service-Orientated Views (SOV)

SOV-2 Service Interface Specification v1.2

The purpose of the Service Interface Specification View (SOV-2) is to define the interfaces presented by a service. A Service presents one or more interfaces to consumers (a “consumer” being any agent capable of using the service – a person, an organisation, a system or another service). In this case, the architect specifies provided interfaces. A service may also be capable of using interfaces exposed by other services, and the architect may specify these as used interfaces.

NAF V3 Equivalency

The equivalent NAF v3 view to SOV-2 is NSOV-2, however the MODAF view is more restricted in that it only specifies the service interfaces (attributes are specified in SOV-1).

Background:

Specifying the interfaces that a service provides and uses defines which Services are compatible with which other Services. If service A provides an interface X, and service B can use interface X then service B can call upon at least some of the functionality of service A.

Usage:

Data objects:

The data in an SOV-2 can include:



Relationships Between Key Data Objects (Simplified from M3)

Representation:

Detailed Product Description:

Service Interfaces are defined in terms of their operations (methods of access) and parameters (data that must be passed to the service, or produced by the service). The interfaces and their operations all have names. Parameters may be simple types (text, numbers, Boolean) or typed by an entity in a Physical Schema (SV-11).

SOV-2 products can be presented in tabular form, or as diagrams (usually UML). If a tabular approach is used, the first five columns are mandatory and should be in the following order:

1) Service Name
2) Interface Name
3) Provided / Used (note that if the service both provides and uses a particular interface, this should be recorded as two entries in the table)
4) Operation Name
5) Parameters



SOV-2 Tabular Representation

A equivalent information in UML format is:



SOV-2 UML Representation

Page version 1.2, dated 20th June 2008

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