The Intentional Services Method
Dr. Yves-Roger Nehan, Computer Science Research Centre (CRI), University of Sorbonne, Paris

Tuesday, December 15th, 2010, 2:00pm

Technology Enhanced Building – TEL 3062

Service-orientation is emerging as the dominant engineering approach for modern information systems. The majority of work on service-oriented computing focuses on the concept of low-level services as fundamental elements for the development of information systems. However, service selection and composition needs to align to organizational and business goals. Our approach aims at making SOC accessible from a business level. For that it is necessary to establish a bridge between high-level services in terms of what the business stakeholders understand and low-level software services in terms of what software application developers are familiar with.

In this talk, I will introduce a service selection and composition approach based on the concept of intentional service. Intentional services explicitly model the intentional aspect of the application and are placed at a level more abstract than traditional SOC.
This intentional vision of services allows us to move the software service description closer to the requirements of the end users. From understanding what the user wants and what the system is capable of, the user can identify services that accurately meet their goals.

Furthermore, an approach for systematic implementation of intentional services is presented. We propose a transformational approach whereby the application is developed via transformations of the intentional services into interactive software services. At each transformational step, descriptions of service models are instances of meta-models that are processed and refined. The transformational technique allows the derivation of an executable software solution that includes both the user interface aspect and the business logic aspect as an appropriate selection and composition of services.

Bio: Yves Roger Nehan has a PhD in Computer Science at the Computer Science Research Centre (CRI) from the University of Sorbonne, Paris. He works in the area of requirements engineering (RE) in conjunction with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Model Driven Engineering (MDE). He is interested in reducing the gap between the formulation of user goals and the conceptual definition of software services, so that the cooperation between the high-level intentional level and the low level operational one is better facilitated.