Barry Talks! : SOA: It's the Semantics, Baby!

Timely reality check from Barry Briggs: 

What's the point of service-enabling something if the service consumers can't understand what the syntax of the service? E.g., if you've got the coolest GetCustomer() service, but no one else understands the semantics of the customer object returned, what good is it?

In many ways (as I'm learning first hand lately) the data modeling part of SOA -- which nobody ever seems to talk about -- is by far the hardest part.

imho data modeling can be complex for two primary reasons:

1.  The facets of the real world you seek to model are complex; you have to respect and accommodate the inherent complexity in the parts of the real world you seek to model.

2.  A lot of existing systems are awful, in terms of data models, and developers often spend an inordinate amount of time reconciling inadequate models.

The data modeling part itself, however, doesn't need to be complex, if you stick with a robust modeling technique such as Carlis/Maguire's Logical Data Structures.

Source: Barry Talks! : Common Sense for Uncommon Times