Model-driven Development of Mediation for Business Services Using COSMO

Although service-oriented architectures offer real benefits when pursuing business integration and flexibility, there are still no satisfactory solutions to accomplish cooperation between services of existing systems that have no perfect match. In the case of incompatible services, a 'mediator' may be introduced which resolves semantic and syntactic interoperability problems by intervening in the cooperation between systems. Building mediators is currently often a manual process, resulting in dedicated IT-driven solutions, with no concern for re-use of process, models or code. This paper presents a framework to guide the development of mediators, with the following objectives: (i) uncover and capture the actual interoperability problem that needs to be solved; (ii) allow the involvement of non-IT (i.e., business) experts in the development of the solution; (iii) support evolution of the solution and re-use of results in case of changing interoperability requirements; (iv) facilitate automation of parts of the process. The framework is based on service-oriented and model-driven techniques. Available tool support for the different elements in the framework is indicated.