OFBiz has a lot of services. I am working on a project that will add
many more. One of the problems with having so many services is locating
one you need. The artifact info feature can locate a service if you
already know its name, but that isn't very helpful.
I would like to add the ability to give services an ontology. Basically,
there would be new service XML elements that would be used for
categorizing services. The new elements will not affect service engine
behavior in any way - they are there for documentation purposes only.
One element I would like to add is <package-name> or <package> - that
would be similar to the entity package name. It would be used to group
services logically . It would be a <service> child element which will
have 0-to-1 instances. In addition, you can define a default at the root
element level so all service definitions in the same file inherit the
package name.
Another child element I would like add to the <service> element is
<domain> - which will have 0-to-n instances. This can be used to
categorize (or classify) services. For example, a service that assigns a
contact mech to a party could have three <domain> elements - one for
party, one for contact mech, and one for assign. So, a documentation
tool could be used to search for the service in any of those domains.
There will be no rules for the contents of the <domain> element - users
are free to classify services in any way they please.
I only plan to add support for the new elements - categorizing (or
classifying) existing services will be left to the rest of the community.
What do you think?
-Adrian
