Glossary

A

Application
A bundle of related Business Services.
Application Suite
A bundle of related applications.
Asynchronous Access Mode
Two channels could be used for input and output. A transaction's input will get an immediate response from the Business Services through alternate channels.

B

BPEL
Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is an open standards-based programming language to compose Web services into business processes (also called orchestrations). BPEL standardizes integration logic and process automation between Web Services.
Business Event
Event configured for a business process.
Business Processes
A business process is a group of business activities undertaken by an organization in pursuit of a common goal.

A business process usually depends upon several business functions for support. A business process rarely operates in isolation, i.e. other business process will depend on it and it will depend on other processes. Following is list of business process elements.

  • Business Ecosystem
  • Business Services Network
  • Business Process Suite
  • Business Process
Business Service
A Business Service is a business function whose execution can be adapted at runtime based on business policy and user context.

A Business Service is defined by three primary elements:

  • Business Metadata: Business policy information used to dynamically tailor the execution of the specific business function for a single instance
  • Canonical Data Model - a standardized representation of data required to dynamically select and tailor the execution of a business function
  • Business Function - One or more services that are selected dynamically based on business policy information, and whose execution leverages a subset of the canonical data model associated with its function. A Business Function service implementation may range in complexity from simple atomic services to composite services, embodying business processes.
Business Service
A Business Service can be an application, business process, content, data, or remote Web service.

The service can be made available over a network, either internally or externally, using open protocols, advanced web service standards, and industry business semantics such as ACORD, HIPAA, HL7, or MISMO.

C

Change Administrator
A Change Administrator/Governance Administrator:
  • Monitors the status of changes and can intervene to redirect changes.
  • Responsible for overall composite business services or SOBAs development to ensure that change requests are being monitored and attended to in a timely manner.
Changelist
The changelist is a cohesive unit consisting of a number of related changes that need to be made together. This is also a list of changes to be applied to the IBM® Business Services Register.

The entire changelist is either accepted rejected — there is no notion of partial acceptance of a changelist.

Channel
Mechanism through which a message is sent to a business service.

A Business Service can support multiple channels like Web Service, Portal, IVR, Fax, WAP, and FTP.

Composite Business Service Assembler
Composite Business Services Assembly engineer or a Composite Business Service Composition Studio user, primarily interested in creating Composite Business Services and responsible for the following tasks:
  1. Creating Composite Business Services.
  2. Searching for services to reuse within IBM Business Services Repository.
  3. Creating new services and associated resources.
  4. Modifying existing services and associated resources.
  5. Publishing modified services into IBM Business Services Repository.

E

Eclipse
Eclipse is at the base of the IBM® WebSphere® Business Services Fabric tools. Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on providing an extensible development platform and application frameworks for building software.

Eclipse provides extensible tools and frameworks that span the software development lifecycle, including support for modeling, language development environments for Java®, C/C++ and others, testing and performance, business intelligence, rich client applications and embedded development.

Eclipse is at the base of IBM WebSphere Business Services Fabric tools. A large, vibrant ecosystem of major technology vendors, innovative start-ups, universities and research institutions and individuals extend, complement and support the Eclipse Platform.

Endpoint
An endpoint is the physical address of a service which implements one or more Web service interfaces.

Its definition includes an endpoint URL, use type (protocols like http and ftp) and a collection of Web service interfaces it implements.

External Governance ID
ID assigned by the ECM System when a changelist is submitted. This field will be visible ONLY if the ECM system is provisioned
External Namespaces
External Namespaces are namespace that represent content that lives entirely in am external system such as LDAP users. The content in external namespaces is always read only in our system

I

IBM Business Services Composition Studio
IBM® Business Services Composition Studio enables domain-experienced software architects to model, create, publish and manage industry-specific service metadata models and policies around data, processes, resources, policies and domains.
IBM Business Services Dynamic Assembler Engine
IBM® Business Services Dynamic Assembler is a highly optimized semantic integration engine. It enables metadata-driven service discovery, matching, and interoperability during both design-time and run-time. IBM Business Services Dynamic Assembler leverages SOA policies to replace hard-coded service bindings in ESB, BPEL,and B2B connections with dynamic end point selection based on content, context and contract.

Optimized for highly scalable performance on application servers, databases and messaging infrastructures from IBM and Oracle, IBM Business Services Dynamic Assembler has proven interoperability with standards-based BPEL process orchestration platforms and ESB infrastructures.

IBM Business Services Governance Manager
IBM Business Services Governance Manager provides end-to-end governance of business services through the design, run-time, deployment and management stages.
IBM Business Services Performance Manager
IBM Business Services Performance Manager — provides visibility and monitoring of service-oriented processes and applications. This module includes multiperspective views and enables drill-down analysis of business-level events and exceptions.
IBM Business Services Subscriber Manager
IBM Business Services Subscriber Manager controls and automates entitlement of business services for subscribers. It enables the creation, control and management of service portfolios for subscribers across a business ecosystem, and integrates with leading security and identity management products.
IBM SOBA Life Cycle Governance
IBM® SOBA Life Cycle Governance is key to assembly of SOBAs and it spans the full life cycle of SOBA from design, deploy, execute and manage time collaboration.

As most of the IT companies provide a Change Management and tracking systems like ClearQuest® and Jira, IBM SOBA Life Cycle Governance leverages what customer has, and provides integration with the Change Management System (hence referred to as External Governance System).

As part of reference implementation, IBM SOBA Life Cycle Governance provides integration with Clear Quest.

L

Loose Coupling
Traditional application design depends upon a tight interconnection of all subsidiary elements.

Loose coupling means that the client of a service is essentially independent of the service. The way a client communicates with the service (typically using Web Service communication standards) doesn't depend on the implementation of the service. Differing implementations are free to change without impacting others as long as the interface remains the same. This also means that the client doesn't have to know very much about the service to use it.

M

Multi-modal Services
Multi-modal services unify multiple communication channels into one interface for centralized maintenance and lower total cost of ownership. Multi-modal channels may include Web, EDI, integrated voice response (IVR), machine-to-machine connections and others, and allow users to select their preferred mode of communication.

N

Namespace
A namespace is a context for identifiers. An identifier defined in a namespace is associated with that namespace. An identifier can be defined in multiple namespaces. The meaning of an identifier in one namespace is completely separate from the meaning it has in any other namespace. Thus, a namespace introduces a new domain in which one can define any identifier with the guarantee that it will not clash with existing identifiers (because those will be associated with other namespaces).
Note: All element names within a namespace must be unique.

O

On Demand Applications
On Demand Applications dynamically and on demand integrate people, business process and information within and across enterprise and application boundaries to help enable the On Demand Enterprise.
On Demand Enterprise
An on demand enterprise is a business whose processes - integrated end-to-end across the company and with key partners including suppliers and customers-can respond with agility and speed to customer demand, market opportunity or external threat.
Ontology
A network of concepts, relationships and constraints that provide context for data, information and processes.

P

Policies
A Policy is a set of Assertions that represent requirements, constraints or capabilities for a Business Service. For example, "A Business Service must use HTTP or HTTPS as a medium of communication" is the example of a policy.

Policies define the business requirements that have to be met when a consumer requests a service.

R

Resources
Resources typically refer to discrete IT assets. A resource can be defined across a broad range of IT asset types:

Resources include:

  • Applicaiton Suite
  • Applicaiton
  • Business Service
  • Web Service
  • endpoint
  • channel
Root Organization
This is the principal and top-level organization amongst a group of related organizations and their subsidiaries. All other organizations in the hierarchy are sub organizations to this root organization.

S

Services
Services are software components with well-defined interfaces that are implementation-independent. An important aspect of SOA is the separation of the service interface (the what) from its implementation (the how). Such services are consumed by clients that are not concerned with how these services will execute their requests. Services are self-contained (perform predetermined task) and loosely coupled (for independence). They can be dynamically discovered. Composite services can be built from aggregates of other services.
SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)
SOA is the next evolutionary step to help IT organizations flexibly align people, information, and business processes across an extended business ecosystem. Service Oriented Architecture is not a new concept, yet it is important at this time because of rapidly maturing XML and Web services technologies that allow organizations to extend the usefulness of past IT investments, while enabling them to build new application systems on demand.

Simply stated, SOA is a computing model in which small, loosely coupled pieces of business functionality are published, consumed, and combined with other applications over a shared services network. When Web services standards are used, these shared services become highly interoperable and incredibly flexible, leading to a new class of robust, loosely coupled applications. As a result, Service Oriented Architectures have become an attractive alternative to the more tightly-coupled, object-oriented application models of the past.

SOBA (Service-Oriented Business Application) or Composite Business Service
The essence of business agility is accessing business data, documents, events, and processes as "on demand services" and then coupling them in new and creative ways to create new business models and competitive advantage; SOBAs, also called composite business services, fulfill this vision.

A SOBA is a collection of Business Services built around a complex, end-to-end business process and optimized to a specific vertical industry. SOBAs use Web services and industry semantic standards; are able to evolve over time; and take advantage of semantic and data interoperability.

Business Services elevate the design, composition, and deployment of Web services to an enterprise level to address business requirements. Abstracting to enterprise-level Business Services provide more meaningful building blocks for the task of automating enterprise and ecosystem-scale business scenarios.

SOBAs dynamically and on demand integrate people, processes, and information across application and enterprise boundaries helping businesses:

  • Automate inter and intra-enterprise processes
  • Expand channels with existing and new partners
  • Generate new and enhanced revenue
  • Manage and control outsourced processes
  • Allow flexible business models

....WHILE

  • Leveraging and extending existing IT investment
  • Mitigating risks via incremental automation and staged investments
  • Reducing complexity of past architectures
  • Reducing total cost of ownership
Sub Organization
Sub organizations or sibling organizations are child organizations existing at the same level in the hierarchy.

Sub Organization can also be a parent organization if it has any child organization listed under it.

Submit Changelist
This service allows the Composite Business Service Assembler to submit changes to the composite business services or SOBAs Governance System.
Subscriber
A subscriber is a person, role, organization, or a machine who is a consumer of a business service.

Following is list of subscribers.

  • Role
  • Organization
  • Business Service
  • User
Subscription Id
Subscription Id is unique for each business service subscription. It is used for endpoint invocation through the IBM® Business Services Dynamic Assembler.
Synchronous Access Mode
One channel is used for input and output. A transaction's input to a service and the service's output are carried out on the same channel. For example, a call made through a Web Service can get a response through the same Web Service channel.

T

Transaction History
This service displays the History/details of all the Changelist(s).

U

UDDI
Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) are a "yellow pages" into which Web services and their associated descriptions (in WSDL) can be registered and retrieved.

W

Web Service
Name of the Web Service.
Webify Industry Fabric
Webify Industry Fabric is an integrated environment for policy driven sourcing, assembly, delivery, and governance of business services and service oriented business applications.
WS-I
The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) is an open industry organization committed to promoting interoperability among Web services, based on common, industry-accepted specifications and related technologies, such as XML, SOAP, and others.
WSDL
Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is a standard for the information needed to access and use a Web Service. It provides a way for service providers to describe the basic format of Web Service requests over different protocols or encodings.