Discussion: Service Ontology

[Adrian Crum <ad...@sandglass-software.com>]

OFBiz has a lot of services. I am working on a project that will add 
many more. One of the problems with having so many services is locating 
one you need. The artifact info feature can locate a service if you 
already know its name, but that isn't very helpful.

I would like to add the ability to give services an ontology. Basically, 
there would be new service XML elements that would be used for 
categorizing services. The new elements will not affect service engine 
behavior in any way - they are there for documentation purposes only.

One element I would like to add is <package-name> or <package> - that 
would be similar to the entity package name. It would be used to group 
services logically . It would be a <service> child element which will 
have 0-to-1 instances. In addition, you can define a default at the root 
element level so all service definitions in the same file inherit the 
package name.

Another child element I would like add to the <service> element is 
<domain> - which will have 0-to-n instances. This can be used to 
categorize (or classify) services. For example, a service that assigns a 
contact mech to a party could have three <domain> elements - one for 
party, one for contact mech, and one for assign. So, a documentation 
tool could be used to search for the service in any of those domains.

There will be no rules for the contents of the <domain> element - users 
are free to classify services in any way they please.

I only plan to add support for the new elements - categorizing (or 
classifying) existing services will be left to the rest of the community.

What do you think?

-Adrian