Service-oriented computing (SOC) is an emerging computing paradigm that utilizes services as the basic constructs to support the development of rapid and easy composition of distributed applications. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the main architectural concept in the field of SOC.
The COMPAS project addresses a major shortcoming in today's approach to design of SOAs: throughout the architecture various compliance concerns must be considered, but so far, the SOA approach does not provide any clear technological strategy or concept of how to realize, enforce, or validate them.

A number of approaches, such as business rules or composition concepts for services have been proposed, but none of these aproaches offers a unified approach with which all kinds of compliance rules can be tackled. This is in part due to the problem that compliance rules are often pervasive throughout the SOA. That is they have to be considered in all components of the SOA, as well as a different development times, including analysis time, design time, and runtime.

In an ideal world it would be possible to provide a software framework to automatically enforce the compliance to such legislations or provisions for the entire IT of an organization. This however, is difficult, because usually it is impossible to formally encode all the details of e.g., a legal document.

The COMPAS project will design and implement novel models, languages, and an architectural framework including required software components and services to ensure dynamic and on-going compliance of software services to business regulations and design rules.
This is achieved using the model-driven software development (MDSD) approach to enable organizations developing custom business compliance solutions faster, cheaper and with less required programming skills. Domain-specific languages will be used to enable non-programmers to work with and understand the compliance models in their domain.

Link: <link http: www.compas-ict.eu>www.compas-ict.eu

For further inquiries, you may contact:
Univ.Prof. Mag. Dr. Schahram Dustdar     
Institute of Information Systems    
Vienna University of Technology
Argentinierstraße 8/1841, 1040 Vienna
Telephone: +43/1/58801 - 18414
E-mail: <link>schahram.dustdar@tuwien.ac.at