IT practitioners striving to meet changing business needs are using service-oriented architectures to speed development, improve visibility into the business impact of IT events, and lower integration and management costs.

To reap these benefits, IT staffs need to provide some level of semantic integration between IT systems. Semantic integration means that not only do systems need to connect (that is, be able to exchange messages), they also need to have a common language for these messages to be translated into action in an automatic way. Without this shared understanding, messages are exchanged but must be translated by a human operator before resulting in any action.

Semantic integration is achieved via models that contain a description of the elements composing a system, as well as the relationships linking them. While not a cure for all problems, models allow better semantic integration through sharing of model elements and the use of transformations, policies and desired-state type of information.

Models can be easily translated from one modeling language to another, so the invoker of the model and the service providers don't need to use the same modeling language. Service Modeling Language, for example, was designed for that purpose. The sharing of models across the life cycle of the system allows experts to enrich the model with information relevant to each stage of the life cycle (such as design, implementation, testing, deployment, operation and retirement).

WS-ResourceTransfer (WS-RT) plays at the intersection of SOA and model-based management. While its goals are modest and its usage will often be hidden, it meets a critical need in allowing model-driven interactions to be conducted in an SOA.

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