Synthesizing a criterion for SOA reference architecture to sustain eParticipation

Abstract

With inception of Service-Orientation in research and industry, the need to select a Reference Architecture (RA) that supports Service Orientation in some specific domain has developed into a challenge. Institutionalizing a criterion that helps software designers and developers to properly extend or design an RA for a domain-specific, goal-aware and context-aware implementation of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) system has evolved into a necessity. In this article, a criterion derived from understanding existing standard SOA reference architectures is presented. In following presented work, we focus specifically on the eParticipation domain to validate the proposed criterion. The criterion will not only help improve the process of refining and specialising standard SOA-RA, but also provides a set of key ingredients to sustain SOA-RA definition in the eGovernment domain, specifically to sustain information integration in eParticipation.