SOA Implementation 

 Realizing a SOA

View the demonstration video View the support page for tutorials and more.

Workshop for Cyberinfrastructure Readiness for Emergency Response at the National Science Foundation (NSF)  - An overview of organization SOA technology implementations in support of emergency management.

SOA related webcasts can be viewed at:

The standard OASIS SOA Reference Model is used for common SOA concepts.

The OASIS SOA reference architecture currently contains the following views and models:

• Business via Services View
• Stakeholders and Participants Model
• Needs and Capabilities Model
• Resources Model
• Social Structure Model
• Realizing a Service Oriented Architecture View
• Service Description Model
• Service Visibility Model
• Interacting with Services Model
• Policies and Contracts Model
• Owning Service Oriented Architectures View
• Governance Model
• Services and Managed Entities Model
• Security Model

For a system architecture framework, pieces of the Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) are used. Government organizations are some of the primary stakeholders pushing SOA, one of the reasons being that government organizations are complex social structures that can benefit from the increased flexibility SOA provides organizations to govern and interoperate across ownership boundaries. Even though it was labeled as Department of Defense, DoDAF can be used for system architecture work by any organization creating large computing systems. With some tailoring of DoDAF, it is actually a nice fit for capturing distributed capabilities in a SOA environment. DoDAF provides a nice dividing line between system architecture and software architecture. Click here for a fairly thorough html overview of DoDAF - from structure, to processes behind creating DoDAF artifacts, to technical service areas and the latest standards that apply to them as defined by the DoD Information Technology Standards and Profile Registry (DISR).

Emergency Management Standards in support of SOA-based Emergency Management Systems

The OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee (EM TC) has been working for the past six years to produce standard alerts and warnings for distributed computing systems. Beginning in 2000, the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) started the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) and CAP v1.0 was standardized in April 2004 by the OASIS EM TC.

Currently the EM TC oversees the production of:

Emergency Data Exchange Resource Message (EDXL-RM) - "The XML-based Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) Resource Messaging specification describes a suite of standard messages for data sharing among emergency and other information systems that deal in requesting and providing emergency equipment, supplies, people and teams, This format may be used over any data transmission system, including but not limited to the SOAP HTTP binding."

Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) Hospital AVailability Exchange (HAVE) - "HAVE ... allows the communication of the status of a hospital, its services, and its resources. These include bed capacity and availability, emergency department status, available service coverage, and the status of a hospital's facility and operations."

Emergency Data Exchange Language Distribution Element (EDXL-DE) - "The primary purpose of the Distribution Element is to facilitate the routing of any properly formatted XML emergency message to recipients. The Distribution Element may be thought of as a "container". It provides the information to route "payload" message sets (such as Alerts or Resource Messages), by including key routing information such as distribution type, geography, incident, and sender/recipient IDs."

Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) - "The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) is a simple but general format for exchanging all-hazard emergency alerts and public warnings over all kinds of networks. CAP allows a consistent warning message to be disseminated simultaneously over many different warning systems, thus increasing warning effectiveness while simplifying the warning task. CAP also facilitates the detection of emerging patterns in local warnings of various kinds, such as might indicate an undetected hazard or hostile act. And CAP provides a template for effective warning messages based on best practices identified in academic research and real-world experience."