Representing and accessing design knowledge for service integration

Process construction from existing services requires use of appropriate design knowledge. For services that are mapped to underlying legacy applications, this takes the form of enterprise integration solutions. Design knowledge in this domain is available in the form of Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP). These patterns are, however, difficult to understand; they also use primitives that are different from those used for process representation. As a result, accessing EIP based on process requirements remains a cognitively demanding task for designers. In this paper, we describe a knowledge-base that represents the EIPs, infusing them with semantics derived from speech acts; and a set of heuristics, which can be used to retrieve EIPs for a set of requirements. An example serves to illustrate how the two can work in tandem to assist the designer.