One of the key aspects of SOA Governance is artifact management, specifically managing the dependencies between the artifacts. This is accomplished through a new breed of tools called SOA Registries. In this article, Joel Amoussou describes what he considers important requirements for a SOA Registry. Indexing of XML-formatted artifacts such as WSDL, XML Schemas, Schematron rules, XSLT transforms, Spring and Hibernate configuration files, data mapping specifications, WS-Policy documents, etc. Ideally users should be able to use languages such as XSLT and XQuery to manipulate artifacts and query the registry. Requirements and specification documents shall be stored in XML (as opposed to MS Word or Excel) if possible so that they can be processed the same way. The SOA Registry shall seat on a native XQuery compliant database. This would provide powerful visualization and reporting capabilities to the registry. I should be able to run an XQuery search against the SOA Registry to return all artifacts that contain a reference to a certain XML element, so that I can visualize the impact that a change to that element would have. Automatic detection of certain dependencies (e.g., WSDL and XML Schemas) shall be supported as well.

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