Use of models and modelling techniques for service development

E-applications are increasingly being composed from individual services that can be realized with different technologies, such as, e.g., Web Services and standard component technologies. A current trend in the development of these services is to describe their technology-independent and technology-specific aspects in separate models. A prominent development that leads this trend is the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA). An important feature of the MDA approach is the explicit identification of Platform-Independent Models (PIMs) and the flexibility to implement them on different platforms via Platform-Specific Models (PSMs), possibly through (automated) model transformations. A platform can be any technology that supports the execution of these models, either directly or after translation to code in a programming language. This paper aims at identifying the benefits of the MDA approach in the development of services for e-applications. The paper presents a short introduction to MDA, in the context of service development, and an overview of the modelling capabilities of the Unified Modelling Language (UML), one of MDA¿s main modelling languages