Dueling Whiteboards (Continued)

In his turn at the whiteboard, Mark O'Neill covered another Web services security scenario that addressed a similar upcoming installation he will undertake for a client later in the week. O'Neill's diagram, in a layout similar to his presentation in the Spring 2003 issue of Enterprise Architect ("Mapping Security to a Services-Oriented Architecture"), included a horizontal arrangement of the consumer, access, services, adapters, and business systems layers:

O'Neill demonstrated that you can use an XML security server, with links to existing security architecture, to pass security context with XML messages through a services layer by way of directory reuse instead of creating a new silo for Web services.

Crystal Clear
David Linthicum made the final presentation of the evening, and he used the opportunity to return to the topic of semantics. Linthicum started out with some interaction with the audience, asking if anyone present had a single definition for the customer or a single definition for a sale. His point was clear: We all have different definitions for data and no common understanding for how to define it. And SOAs, according to Linthicum, "are exacerbating the problem."

Linthicum began diagramming his "magical" solution by representing the creation of local semantic domains, but because metadata "doesn't get us where we want to go," he represented the extensions of creating the community domain, and the vertical domain. The flow indicated that the community domain inherits semantics from the local domain, and the vertical domain inherits semantics from the community domain. Linthicum continued by diagramming "the almighty repositories" in addition to transformation/mapping, runtime execution, and process layers, with toolsets and security rounding out the solution diagram:

Victory was spread out among the participants. Linthicum had the best overall score (59) as well as the top score for the clarity category (24). The originality category drew a tie with a best score (19) shared by Boubez and Hollander. And best score (19) for the significance-to-enterprise-architecture category drew a three-way tie among Boubez, Keene, and Linthicum. Congratulations to all participants for a great event.

About the Author
Terrence O'Donnell is managing editor of Enterprise Architect.