Patent ID: 7904480

Claim:
A method for synchronizing service metadata into a format for canonical representation of service metadata, comprising: inspecting a plurality of applications, each application providing at least one service having service metadata associated therewith, wherein said each application generates the service metadata in a native format, and wherein the service metadata includes at least a set of service interfaces and a set of service dependencies between said service interfaces; providing a plurality of connectors for said plurality of applications, wherein each type of said application is associated with a different connector depending on said type of the application; obtaining the service metadata from each of said plurality of applications by the set of connectors, wherein each connector populates a node object with the service metadata in said native format; providing said node object from the connector to a normalizer; normalizing the service metadata of said each application by the normalizer, wherein the normalizer converts the node object from the native format into the format for canonical representation of service metadata and creates an artifact to contain the canonical representation, and wherein the format for the canonical representation of the service metadata is Service Component Architecture (SCA); storing the artifact into a repository; constructing a synchronized dependency graph based on the service dependencies between the service interfaces, wherein the service dependencies are normalized; and exposing, by said repository, an interface to retrieve the artifact associated with an application, wherein once the artifact is retrieved, a set of all dependent artifacts related to said artifact as indicated by the dependency graph are also retrieved, and wherein the interface exposed by the repository is Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI).