Facilitating enterprise service discovery for non-technical business users

Abstract

Enterprise Services (ES) are Web services with which enterprise applications expose a subset of their functionality. Due to the often high number of different ES, as well as the complex nature of their names, it is difficult for non-technical business users to discover services in ES repositories. However, most of this complexity stems from a SOA governance-driven service design process that is essential to the development of harmonized and long-lasting ES. Based on the example of SAP's ES, we describe a representational model that consolidates existing models and patterns used during the service design process. We created an iterative search approach that uses this consolidated metadata. The evaluation of the approach with real business users, based on a prototypical implementation, demonstrates that our iterative search is more efficient and effective than the currently offered search. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.