Service-Oriented Architecture

Synonyms

Organization of IT infrastructure based on services

Definition

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an approach to the architecture of information systems based on independently managed loosely-coupled services that can be discovered and invoked, regardless of their underlying implementation, via a relatively small set of well-defined messages passing interfaces. SOA emphasizes separation of services from applications, which are built by combining the services. In this sense it is a complement of grid approaches, which focus on virtualization of resources and mapping of resources to specific implementations.

Main Text

SOA has emerged as the leading approach to cyberinfrastructure development in several large earth sciences projects aimed at creating a domain environment that integrates databases, research tools and software codes developed on multiple platforms and maintained at distributed locations. In such a system, various online and desktop clients can access the same...