Leveraging Data Models to Create a Unified Business Vocabulary for Service Oriented Architectures

Early SOA initiatives generally focused on defining business services first, and worrying about the data later. Today, we acknowledge that services and data must work in concert to produce coherent and well-aligned service architectures. The unifying elements in the architecture include a shared definition of business information structure, validity and vocabulary – in other words, the metadata.

This article describes a best practice that shows how to leverage data architecture to create a vocabulary for Web applications. The practice works to ensure that industry standard terminology and business entity definitions are preserved through the layers of an SOA. Moreover, it is flexible enough to accommodate evolving business requirements.