One of the questions that comes up from time to time is how to define your services. This has come up for me in two independent fora: within the OASIS Service Oriented Architecture work and in the context of human provided services, for example at Genietown . In the work on the SOA Reference Model we decided that "services are the mechanism by which needs and capabilities are brought together"; i.e., its about needs and capabilities to satisfy those needs, and the access mechanism. However, this still begs the question somewhat. In the domain of human services, where the services are things like "building a home", "walking the dog", "taking care of my elderly parents"; it gets even fuzzier. Sometimes a service seems to organized around the person offering the service, for example, an architect, or a doctor. Sometimes the service is organized around a particular kind of product, such as doors or skylights. At other times, the service is organize
A sporadic series of essays on things that interest me. Mostly about programming in one form or another.