An increasingly important class of software-based systems is platforms that permit integration of third-party components, services, and tools. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is one such platform that has been successful in providing integration and distribution in the business domain, and could be effective in other domains (e.g., scientific computing, healthcare, and complex decision making). In this paper, we discuss our application of SOA to provide an integration platform for socio-cultural analysis, a domain that, through models, tries to understand, analyze and predict relationships in large complex social systems. In developing this platform, called SORASCS, we had to overcome issues we believe are generally applicable to any application of SOA within a domain that involves technically naïve users and seeks to establish a sustainable software ecosystem based on a common integration platform. We discuss these issues, the lessons learned about the kinds of problems that occur, and pathways toward a solution.

Software architectures evolve over time, and so do the models that represent them. For a domain like Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) this is particularly true because most SOA solution designs are based on modification of existing assets that change over time. However, today there exists only limited work that reasons about this evolution. In this work we present our framework for traceability of evolving architectures that we apply for SOA solution design. Our design approach is based on an iterative process that utilizes a set of solution patterns to guide architects in the SOA solution design. Our approach utilizes historical data about pattern enablement and uses that to guide architects in selecting the right patterns. To ensure that the right patterns are used, we use a template matching approach that enforces conformance by allowing only the right set of artifacts to be composed together. We demonstrate how our framework can be applied to compose and trace evolving SOA solutions based on three views - the artifact view, profile view and compliance view.

In this work we present a case study of a SOA realization exercise at a business information provider firm, which deals with disparate sources of data in-order to provide reliable reports to its clients. Unlike typical enterprise scenarios, where applications are required to be service enabled, the key requirement here was to service enable its data acquisition, quality check, reporting and other processes which are either mostly manual or ETL based workflows. This paper also addresses how shared services, business processes, rules, and semantics are used to provide quality and agility to the internal processes many of which are entirely dependent on the type of data received. The case and the scenario are chosen specifically to emphasize the fact, that mere web-services implementation does not lead to service oriented architecture, but it is the appropriate usage of them.