When designing your SOA and services, keeping the service consumer in mind
will make the job easier. Consumers must conform to the interfaces of each
service they use and invoke them with the right data in the right format. The
more similarity there is among services, the less coding and translation your
consumers will have to do. Using the techniques of transformation, semantic
data modeling, and a conceptual data model can make your job much easier -
both during initial design and testing and when making changes later.
The interface specifications, protocols, and data formats used in SOA and Web
Services are designed to create services with "loose coupling" between the
service consumer and service provider. The service provides a consumer with
an abstraction representing some business function so that the consumer
doesn't have to be concerned with the details of ho... (more)