An intentional view of service-oriented computing

Despite its growing acceptance, Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) remains a computing mechanism to speed-up the design of software applications by assembling readymade software services. We argue that it is difficult for business people to fully benefit ofSOC if it remains at the software level. The paper proposes a move towards a description of services in business terms, i.e. intentions and strategies to achieve them and to organize their publication, search and composition on the basis of these descriptions. In this way, it leverages SOC to an intentional level, the ISOC. We present ISM, the model to describe intentional services, and populate the service registry with their descriptions. We highlight its intention driven perspective for service description, retrieval and composition. Thereafter, we propose a methodology to determine intentional services that meet business goals and to publish them in the registry. Finally, we introduce an agent architecture to support a model driven execution of intentional services.