Case studies - examples of service-oriented approaches at work
Case studies illustrate real-world uses of service-oriented approaches (soa) and show how others have successfully incorporated soa into their institutional infrastructure.
Early SOA adopters
- Introducing SOA at City University, London (3.3 MB
)
Entitled 'Going for Gold', this report details City University's journey toward a services-based infrastructure and outlines how their incremental approach to adoption - based on three individual business projects - has laid the foundations for future developments.
-- Version 1.1; October 2008
- The National Library of Australia (NLA) Case Study
The National Library of Australia collects, manages and makes available a national collection of library material and also delivers a range of federated resource discovery services that enable access to material of interest to Australians in other collections and on the Internet. It deals with content in all formats - text, image, audio, video - and is internationally known for its work in digitising its physical collections and collecting, delivering and preserving born digital content. In 2007, it issued a report that recommended adopting a service-oriented approach, treating all of its services as a single business, and considering open-source software solutions when these are functional or robust. Since then, it has been developing support for its business processes in accordance with these recommendations, using an evolving service framework to develop a shared understanding of what is involved and to direct priorities.
The Library would like to be part of a community of people working on similar problems who are interested in interoperable, standards-based solutions that can foster the development of a national information infrastructure. It sees the e-Framework as a way of achieving this objective both within Australia and internationally. The services it defines in its own framework have thus been aligned with the service genres in the e-Framework where there are clear parallels. Functions such as Authenticate, Search, Harvest and Log correspond directly to e-Framework service genres. Others such as Select and Preserve are business processes that still need to be broken down further into service genres using the e-Framework Service Usage Model (SUM) approach. This is where the Library is now focusing its modelling work, with particular emphasis on collection management and delivery services.
Through initiatives such as the FRED Project, the e-Framework has a mature understanding of the services needed to build federated metadata registries and deliver resource discovery services. These are also services where the Library has a lot of implementation expertise. The Library hopes to contribute in the development of a core SUM that distills the information in the FRED SUM and also includes support for import and export of data in a range of formats and services that assist in maintaining the quality of the aggregated data such as match, merge, and global change. The e-Framework is less well-developed at the moment in the area of collection management and delivery. Here the Library hopes to be able to contribute to the service genre and SUM registries with its own evolving understanding of how these processes would need to be supported in a standards-based, service-oriented architecture.
| -- Version 1.0; October 2008 |
[NB. This statement is endorsed by Warwick Cathro, Assistant Director-General, Resource Sharing and Innovation of the National Library of Australia (NLA)] |
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The views expressed in papers and contributions are the views of the contributor and contributing organisations and may not reflect the views of the e-Framework Partnership.
Last updated 20 March 2009