SOA Trader has measured the growth in the number of public Web services and their operations since early 2005 up til now. The measuring has been based on collection and analysis of Web service interface descriptions in WSDL format. While early 2005 about 1000 Web services with altogether 10k operations were spotted, by 2009 these numbers had reached nearly 25k and 260k respectively.

Cloud computing has been seen as a key enabler for new scalable SaaS applications. While private clouds would be used for enterprise applications in OLTP/OLAP and multi-tenancy settings, business cases for public clouds are still in their preliminary stages. The latter has been pointed out by several industry experts such as by Dr. Ephraim Feig at Wednesday's panel of SCC 2009 conference. At the same time SaaS concept has proven to be success, and if to believe predictions of IDC and other consulting companies, then SaaS market is expected to grow this year by 40% (see http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=644).

Several software developers, with good understanding of UML and other industrial modelling languages, have been concerned with how to get most cost-effectively started with semantic interoperability projects. If they are going to adopt the bottom-up approach there may be some help from UML2OWL transformation tools. A good colleague of mine, Hele-Mai Haav from Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology, suggested some links for getting started.

In one of my earlier blog entries I elaborated redundancy in federated information systems. The following picture illustrates such redundancy. Cluster map technology is used there to represent overlappings of entity attribute clusters. Each cluster represents entity attributes in an information system description. Overlapping areas represent entity attributes, which are potentially redundant, since they appear in several clusters at the same time.

Hurray!!! The fully rejuvenated XML services marketplace soatrader.com is available! Anyway, what is different compared to its predecessor and why should you care of this?

When soatrader.com went public in May 2007 our aim at SOA Trader, Ltd. was to deliver to service providers a web-based XML services marketplace for selling licenses to their services and help service requesters in purchasing such licenses online by serving as a license sales and service delivery broker. The latter was supposed to enable on-demand delivery of services as promoted with technologies and business models such as ASP (Application Service Provision), SaaS (Software as a Service) and SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture). In fact, SOA Trader, Ltd. did not serve as a mere reseller of service licenses, but also provided an XML services mediation infrastructure, which hid direct connection to service providers’ XML services and facilitated additional security layer to service providers’ servers while allowing provision of adequate third-party QoS metrics to the service requesters.

Many countries, including member states of the European Union, have currently some semantic interoperability initiatives going on, which would affect already in near future the ways how we interact with governmental databases and registries, not to mention the ways how intra- and intergovernmental activities are going to advance. Interoperability, as defined by IEEE, is the ability of two or more systems or components

A major issue in information systems management is avoiding data redundancy, that is, ensuring that each fact is represented in a single place. Data redundancy does not origin only from duplicated records within a database, but perhaps more frequently, from a common practice to store partially overlapping entries in multiple databases or information systems. For instance, it often happens that supplier contact addresses are stored in the procurement, billing, logistics and technical support subsystems though it would make sense to store this address at one subsystem and refer to it from others by means of a supplier identifier.

Several experts, such as Frank Kenney, have pointed out that one of the main causes for failure of SOA implementations relate to organizational issues. Organization’s readyness to adopt new line of thinking brought into the organization via developed IT solutions is definitely an important failure aspect common to majority of IT projects. Therefore in this article I am not going to discuss organizational issuses related to SOA implementations but rather focus to technical details.