So, when Chris Harding, Forum Director for The Open Group's SOA working group, proposed an SOA reference architecture at the organizations Enterprise Architect Practitioners conference in San Diego this week, the room erupted in a surprisingly vigorous debate.

A reference architecture is essentially a blueprint of the pieces that comprise a technology or process.

This being The Open Group, it wasn't surprising that the group's own enterprise architecture framework provided the starting point for the SOA proposal.