Service Choreography, SBVR, and Time
This work addresses the challenge of coordinating participant services in business applications for domain specialists, but it is incremental as it builds on existing SBVR standards with a time extension.
The authors tackled the problem of specifying service choreographies by proposing a declarative approach using the OMG standard Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules (SBVR) extended with time to capture coordination through observable message exchanges, enabling domain specialists to verify service compositions via structured English and machines to parse and execute the model.
We propose the use of structured natural language (English) in specifying service choreographies, focusing on the what rather than the how of the required coordination of participant services in realising a business application scenario. The declarative approach we propose uses the OMG standard Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules (SBVR) as a modelling language. The service choreography approach has been proposed for describing the global orderings of the invocations on interfaces of participant services. We therefore extend SBVR with a notion of time which can capture the coordination of the participant services, in terms of the observable message exchanges between them. The extension is done using existing modelling constructs in SBVR, and hence respects the standard specification. The idea is that users - domain specialists rather than implementation specialists - can verify the requested service composition by directly reading the structured English used by SBVR. At the same time, the SBVR model can be represented in formal logic so it can be parsed and executed by a machine.