David Houlding is an Enterprise Architect at Perot Systems Healthcare with 15 years of experience across healthcare, financial services, insurance, manufacturing, telecommunications, insurance, satellite imaging, and R&D.

David leads a team of architects that has successfully developed a large scale web enabled enterprise SOA in the payer healthcare domain. He has successfully established an ontology driven approach to support this enterprise SOA and currently maintains a knowledge base with over half a million concepts across the business, technology and organization domains. With several patents granted by the USPTO and several more in the application stage, he has a proven innovation track record.

He has an MASc in Data Compression and Digital Signal Processing from Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, and a BSc in Electronic Engineering from South Africa’s Natal University. David has presented at numerous major industry conferences including ECommerce World, Wireless One and Java Development conferences.

He has also published extensively in major trade journals including Dr Dobbs Journal, and made contributions to book publications including XML and Web Services Unleashed, and has been interviewed for newspaper and other articles.

Presentations
Evolution of SOA and Web 2.0
SOA, SaaS (Software as a Service) and Web 2.0 are driving forces shaping enterprise architectures today. This session explores SOA, SaaS and Web 2.0 and their convergence in presenting how to grow a local enterprise SOA into a federated SOA distributed over the web, where remotely accessible services are both used and delivered as SaaS. Several key challenges are presented with practical recommendations including the importance of service decomposition and interface design, isolating dependencies behind service interfaces for agility, as well as security, licensing, and network and remote service availability. "Mashups" are also discussed, together with how they relate to SOA over the web and how, if used inappropriately, they may circumvent some of the benefits of SOA and SaaS. In this session attendees will gain a better understanding of the drivers, principles and concepts that enable enterprise SOA's to publish themselves to others as SaaS, and form large scale systems of federated SOA's over the web. This leads to minimizing redundancy, enabling specialization, and improving agility of business in terms of realizing new sophisticated capability faster than ever before. Concepts are illustrated with a working example SOA that accesses remote services over the web.

Ontology Driven SOA with Protégé
With ever increasing sophistication, enterprise SOA's have reached the point where their successful growth and evolution depends critically on being able to manage complex dependencies, not only within technology, but also between technology, business and organizational aspects of the enterprise. Nowhere is this challenge more apparent than in service interfaces where proper decomposition and interface design are pivotal in the success of the enterprise SOA. This challenge is compounded by the fact that interoperability in popular middleware options for accessing services, for example SOAP/HTTP, is often not 100%, and service interfaces must avoid the use of certain relatively non-portable aspects or proprietary features. Performance is yet another aspect of SOA’s that depends critically on good service interface definition. An ontology driven approach in an enterprise SOA enables management of complex dependencies across the business, technology and organizational aspects of the enterprise, as well as definition of key technology aspects such as service interfaces, all within a consistent central knowledge base. In this session attendees will learn about a practical, holistic, ontology driven approach to managing an enterprise SOA. Concepts are illustrated with working examples in Protégé (protege.stanford.edu), including managing dependencies, and generation of reports and service interface definitions.

return to program