IntelliGOV - A semantic approach for compliance validation of service-oriented architectures

Abstract

Organizations are adopting Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to increase operation’s efficiency and flexibility. To accomplish these goals, it is necessary to ensure that the architecture and its evolution are compliant with business goals, best practices, legal and regulatory requirements. However, the diversity of domains and stakeholders involved in SOA solutions demands complex and expensive work to validate the architecture compliance. Hence, it can result in high costs and low quality assessment if the organization does not use an effective approach in this scenario. In addition, it would be important to consider standards and open solutions in order to promote interoperability and reuse of available tools, making it easier to spread throughout the organizations. We propose intelliGov, an architecture that aims to solve these problems by using ontologies, semantic rules and queries in order to simplify the compliance validation process. The architecture employs open standards-OWL, SWRL and SQWRL-in its implementation. A case study, executed in a global energy company that is currently adopting SOA, demonstrates gains in quality and costs of the compliance assessment process using the proposed architecture.