SOA and ecommunity

Saturday, September 03, 2005

SOA and ecommunity

Today I'm wondering what drives an e-community! The need to socialize in a structured manner hasn't gone away. Well, most of us want friends or acquaintances who have something in common with us. May be interests or hobbies, maybe similar age groups and similar challenges in life, or similar life or behavioural patterns. Is an e-community service just for the hippie and funky? Definitely not - no service can really take off if it is not for the overall benefit of the larger society.

Most of our activities are centered around discovering services which are available in a directory. This is essentially what an UDDI registry based service does. For example, find those trains that travel via a particular route, are tickets available, what kind of food will be availabe at the train stations and can I get that information based on my eating profile, and during my transit stays can I get some movie tickets - again please look at my profile to see what movies I like and I would like to meet some of my friends from my alumni located at my destination city. Can i meet them? They aer all buddies in different e-communites some in AOL, some in Yahoo, some of google - can I see them all in one place and can I establish a meeting between us and book a restaurant table too?

The options are mind boggling. It looks like an utopian dream. But when businesses and services structure their data representation abstracted for web services and if they can register their services in a standard fashion and publish them, it's going to be much easier to do many routine things we spend time on today.

Let us wish good luck for overselves!