Information Model Mediation: Esperanto vs Babel Fish

In my quite popular post SOA: Canonical "Data" Model (picked up by Steve Jones, David Linthicum, Jean-Jacques Dubray and others), I used two analogies for the semantic mediation needed when composing different services into business processes: Esperanto and the Babel fish. This post is about how the two approaches differ in their use of the business process information model (BPIM). But first a short recap of the two terms:

Esperanto is a common world language; when you learn it, you can speak with any other person in the world that also known Esperanto. Everyone does of course still have their native language. See how similar this is to services that interact using a common information model (CIM) to express themselves, while every system still use their own domain model inside.

A Babel fish is a small fish that you put in your ear, which is capable of simultaneously translating any known language in the universe to yours, while adapting semantics between galaxies. See how similar this is to services that interact using a common logical data model (LDM) while every system still uses their own domain model to express themselves.

Both these approaches to semantic mediation in service-oriented solutions do use a business process information model (BPIM). They differ only in how they implement the transformation between formats: inside the services or outside the services.

The CIM approach to mediation is to use the BPIM directly in the service contracts and apply the transformation within the provided services [Hohpe/Woolf: Messaging Mapper pattern (477)]. This is a simple and viable approach; the services are self-contained, but require a bit more to implement and test due to the extra mediation requirements. The services will also need to be changed and tested when the BPIM changes. Dan North suggests this approach in his 'A Low-Tech Approach to Understanding SOA' article. This is still the most common approach, especially for those without an ESB.

There is one minor challenge with the CIM approach: chances are that the Esperanto of an alien galaxy will differ from your Esperanto. Thus, when outsourcing an activity service such as 'credit check', you need to adapt to the service provider's business concepts. So even if you use a CIM for all your enterprise services, you will still need to implement some sort of mediation to do the context mapping between the two federated business domains.

The huge advantage of the CIM approach is that it doesn't require any ESB-style intermediary. The services speak "CIM" natively and thus no transformation to/from the common data model is needed. Note that the service implementation must still map between the CIM format and its internal data formats.

The LDM approach involves using an orchestration mechanism to compose business processes from the set of domain specific services. The services just provide their functions independent of who the requesters (consumers) are and how they try to interact with the services. Think of your SOA solution as having Event Driven Architecture (EDA) to free yourself from "invoking operations" and think of business events and messages instead. It is the task of the Babel fish to mediate and transform the messages sent between consumers and providers [Hohpe/Woolf: Message Translator pattern (87)]. The intermediary can be just the service composition mechanism, but an Service Bus is a more robust and flexible mediation and transformation mechanism.

The LDM approach makes the services themselves simpler and easier to implement and test as they now have just a single responsibility. The services need not change when the BPIM changes, that complexity has been shifted to the intermediary. Implementing semantic mediation outside the services is proposed by Jack van Hoof, David Chappell (Pope of ESB), Bobby Woolf and many others.