A Semantic Service Oriented Architecture (SSOA) is an architecture that allows for scalable and controlled Enterprise Application Integration

Enterprise application integration

Enterprise Application Integration is defined as the use of software and computer systems architectural principles to integrate a set of enterprise computer applications.- Overview :...

 solutions. SSOA describes a sophisticated approach to enterprise-scale IT infrastructure. It leverages rich, machine-interpretable descriptions of data, services, and processes to enable software agent

Software agent

In computer science, a software agent is a piece of software that acts for a user or other program in a relationship of agency, which derives from the Latin agere : an agreement to act on one's behalf...

s to autonomously interact to perform critical mission functions. SSOA is technically founded on three notions:

1. The principles of Service-oriented architecture
   Service-oriented architecture
   In software engineering, a Service-Oriented Architecture is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of interoperable services. These services are well-defined business functionalities that are built as software components that can be reused for...
   
    (SOA);
2. Standards Based Design (SBD); and
3. Semantics
   Semantics
   Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
   
   -based computing.

SSOA combines and implements these computer science concepts into a robust, extensible architecture capable of enabling complex, powerful functions.

Related technologies

• Resource Description Framework
  Resource Description Framework
  The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium specifications originally designed as a metadata data model...
  
   (RDF)
• Web Ontology Language
  Web Ontology Language
  The Web Ontology Language is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies.The languages are characterised by formal semantics and RDF/XML-based serializations for the Semantic Web...
  
   (OWL)
• SPARQL
  SPARQL
  SPARQL is an RDF query language; its name is an acronym that stands for SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language. It was made a standard by the RDF Data Access Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium, and considered as one of the key technologies of semantic web...
  
  

Applications

In the health care

Health care

Health care is the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in humans. Health care is delivered by practitioners in medicine, chiropractic, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, allied health, and other care providers...

 industry, SSOA of HL7 has long been implemented. Other protocols include LOINC

LOINC

Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes is a database and universal standard for identifying medical laboratory observations. It was developed and is maintained by the Regenstrief Institute, a US non-profit medical research organization, in 1994...

, PHIN

Public Health Information Network

The Public Health Information Network is a national initiative, developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , for advancing fully capable and interoperable information systems in public health organizations...

, and HIPAA

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 was enacted by the U.S. Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996. It was originally sponsored by Sen. Edward Kennedy and Sen. Nancy Kassebaum . Title I of HIPAA protects health insurance coverage for workers and their...

 related standards. There is a series of SSOA-related ISO standards published for financial services

Financial services

Financial services refer to services provided by the finance industry. The finance industry encompasses a broad range of organizations that deal with the management of money. Among these organizations are credit unions, banks, credit card companies, insurance companies, consumer finance companies,...

, which can be found at the ISO's website^,,. Some financial sectors also adopt EMV

EMV

EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard and VISA, a global standard for inter-operation of integrated circuit cards and IC card capable point of sale terminals and automated teller machines , for authenticating credit and debit card transactions.It is a joint effort between Europay, MasterCard and...

 standards to facilitate European consumers. A part of SSOA on transport and trade are in the ISO sections of 03.220.20 and 35.240.60^,. Some general guidelines of the technology and the standards in other fields are partially located at 25.040.40, 35.240.99^,,.

See also

• Cyber security standards
  Cyber security standards
  Cyber security standards are security standards which enable organizations to practice safe security techniques to minimize the number of successful cyber security attacks. These guides provide general outlines as well as specific techniques for implementing cyber security. For certain specific...
  
  
• ISO/IEC 7816
• ISO 8583
  ISO 8583
  ISO 8583 Financial transaction card originated messages — Interchange message specifications is the International Organization for Standardization standard for systems that exchange electronic transactions made by cardholders using payment cards...
  
  
• ISO/IEC 8859
  ISO/IEC 8859
  ISO/IEC 8859 is a joint ISO and IEC series of standards for 8-bit character encodings. The series of standards consists of numbered parts, such as ISO/IEC 8859-1, ISO/IEC 8859-2, etc. There are 15 parts, excluding the abandoned ISO/IEC 8859-12...
  
  
• ISO 9241
  ISO 9241
  ISO 9241 is a multi-part standard from the International Organization for Standardization covering ergonomics of human-computer interaction. It is managed by the ISO...
  
  
• ISO 9660
  ISO 9660
  ISO 9660, also referred to as CDFS by some hardware and software providers, is a file system standard published by the International Organization for Standardization for optical disc media....
  
  
• ISO/IEC 11179
  ISO/IEC 11179
  ISO/IEC 11179 is an international standard for representing metadata for an organization in a metadata registry.- Intended purpose :...
  
  
• ISO/IEC 15408
• ISO/IEC 15414
• ISO/IEC 17799
• ISO/IEC 18028
• ISO/IEC 18045
• ISO 19132
• ISO/IEC 19500
• ISO/IEC 19502
• ISO/IEC 19763
• ISO/IEC 23988
• ISO/IEC 27000-series
  ISO/IEC 27000-series
  The ISO/IEC 27000-series comprises information security standards published jointly by the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission .The series provides best practice recommendations on information security management, risks and controls...
  
  
• Service component architecture
  Service Component Architecture
  Service Component Architecture is a software technology created by major software vendors including IBM and Oracle. SCA provides a model for composing applications that follow Service-Oriented Architecture principles...
  
  
• Transitioning Applications to Ontologies
• Semantic web
  Semantic Web
  The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...
  
  
• EMML
  EMML
  EMML, or Enterprise Mashup Markup Language, is an XML markup language for creating enterprise mashups, which are software applications that consume and mash data from variety of sources, often performing logical or mathematical operations as well as presenting data. Mashed data produced by...
  
  
• Business Intelligence 2.0
  Business Intelligence 2.0
  Business Intelligence 2.0 is a term that refers to new tools and software for business intelligence, beginning in the mid-2000s, that enable, among other things, dynamic querying of real-time corporate data by employees, and a more web- and browser-based approached to such data, as opposed to the...
  
  (BI 2.0)

External links

• Open SOA Collaboration
• OSGi Alliance
• QuASAR, Quality Assurance of Semantic Annotations of web seRvices.