Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) offer many compelling opportunities to address pressing problems in large IT infrastructures and enterprise application integration. SOAs promote a new approach for building distributed applications by composing reusable services thanks to well-defined interoperation semantics based on standard protocols. This new approach to software development based on reuse and composition promises many benefits, such as extensibility, ease of maintenance, and reduced development effort and cost. For these reasons, SOAs have recently attracted much attention in both academia and industry.

The SOSOA project explores a novel, self-organizing approach to the design of next-generation service-oriented architectures. The main objective of the project is to overcome the following limitations of current SOAs.
Due to the success of SOA, the problem of managing large collections of services has become crucial. Also known as the SOA governance problem, the issue reflects that little is known about deploying, invoking, monitoring, and providing load balancing and fault tolerance over a highly dynamic collection of services each one possibly representing a complex application running on a cluster-based infrastructure.