In a meeting yesterday, we discussed the various ‘types’ of services.  There are some pretty passionate folks, and each person came to the meeting with their own taxonomy in mind.  The problem with labeling services with a ‘type’ is that you have to have a good idea of what you will do with this attribute.  Is it used to describe the service behavior or the service logical domain?  Is it used to describe that behavior to a developer, to a business person, or to another enterprise architect?  Does it matter who the source of the taxonomy is?

The IASA is working on creating a taxonomy, but that may take a while.  In the meantime, we have a long list of standards.  The Microsoft DSI has some terms.  Microsoft Biztalk has some terms, as does the WCF (Indigo).  Then, outside the Microsoft world, there are taxonomies from the analysis organzations (Gartner/Meta, and others) as well as from software and hardware vendors. 

The net result of having no standard is that every organization invents one. 

Including, unfortunately, mine.

(We may end up with multiple taxonomies, one for architects that describes some particularly useful aspects of the behavior, and one for business consumers to describe a disjoint set of behaviors that has to do with business capabilities).