SWIM Governance

The SWIM Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) governance effort focuses on enabling a set of enforceable policies, procedures, processes, tools, and organizational structures that together ensure a consistent alignment between business objectives and technology goals.

SWIM governance supports the following activities:

Policies, Standards and Specifications

The adoption of a net-centric paradigm in the FAA has brought about the need for standards and procedures for documenting Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) services and service development processes. To ensure interoperability and achieve business objectives across the SOA deployment in the NAS, all SOA-based components must follow a common set of standards and policies.

The SWIM Governance Team developed, or participated in the development of, a number of FAA standards essential for implementing SOA in the FAA.

NAS Service Registry/Repository (NSRR)

The NSRR is a service registry and repository established by the SWIM program. It is an integral component of SWIM's implementation of SOA. Not only does it share and track information about services, but it also facilitates policy enforcement throughout the service lifecycle.

In addition to being a flexible mechanism for service discovery, NSRR also supports an automated policies-based way to manage services throughout their lifecycle, tracks the progression of service development, notifies users about selected changes in service metadata and lifecycle status, and manages service-associated artifacts. Visit the NSRR Library or read its extensive Help Index to learn more.

Service Semantics

In the SWIM environment, where different software-intensive systems are developed by different organizations at different sites by different groups of developers, it becomes increasingly important to assure that information exchanged by services and information used to describe services (service metadata) are interpreted and processed in a consistent and unambiguous manner, by both people and computers. To achieve this, SWIM is developing a set of semantic artifacts that currently includes a shared controlled vocabulary of SOA terms, taxonomies for classifying services, and a Web service ontology that supports model-driven development of Web service metadata documents. SWIM also facilitates semantic interoperability through the consistent use of description standards (e.g. Dublin Core, SKOS, and OWL).

International Collaboration

The SWIM Governance Team works together with government, industry, and academic partners and international aviation organizations on a number of joint efforts to develop and promote SOA standards, technologies, and products that help the aviation community to explore, find, understand, and utilize SWIM services worldwide.