Information technology (IT) professionals are moving to meet the changing demands of business by using service-oriented architecture (SOA) to speed up development, improve the visibility of the business impact of IT events, and reduce the costs of integration and management. In order to achieve these benefits, IT needs to provide a level of semantic integration between IT systems. This means that systems must have a common language in order to communicate and have messages translate into actions automatically. Without such a shared understanding, messages can be exchanged, but they must then be translated by a human operator before any action results. Semantic integration is achieved through models that contain a description of the elements that make up a system and on the relationships that link them. Models provide for better semantic integration by sharing model elements and using transformations, policies, and desire-state information. Models can be translated easily from one modeling language to another. For example, Service Modeling Language was designed to allow invokers of the model and service providers to use different languages. Sharing models across the life cycle of a system lets experts enhance the model with information that is relevant to each stage of the cycle. WS-Resource Transfer (WS-RT) works at the intersection of SOA and model-based management. It allows model-driven interactions to be conducted in an SOA.