Pay close attention; I'm going to get technical for awhile. When dealing with application integration and SOA, as you know by now, we are dealing with much complexity. The notion of ontologies helps the application integration and SOA architect prepare generalizations that make the problem domain more understandable. In contrast to abstraction, generalization ignores many of the details and ends up with general Pay close attention; I’m going to get technical for awhile. When dealing with application integration and SOA, as you know by now, we are dealing with much complexity. The notion of ontologies helps the application integration and SOA architect prepare generalizations that make the problem domain more understandable. In contrast to abstraction, generalization ignores many of the details and ends up with general ideas. Therefore, when generalizing, we start with a collection of types and analyze commonalities to generalize them. Software Development