Loosely coupled/decoupled?

We at ObjectSecurity have looked at loosely coupled systems and the idea of decoupling for more than a decade now. Over the years there were various incarnations of middleware, and now there is SOA. Since the advent of component based systems (e.g. CCM, J2EE) and XML webservices, the issue of coupling as been (somewhat) tackled. That is, it has been tackled on a syntactic level: well-specified interfaces and service/component descriptions can be obtained from somewhere (e.g. in a SOA registry, WSDL/UDDI, CORBA trader service) and the consumer can connect to the provider. However, on a semantic level everything is still as tightly coupled as before - the consumer needs to understand what each parameter actually means, and both parties need to have a common understanding of the meaning of parameters descriptions passed around.
So what really needs to be tackled for SOA decoupling is the semantic decoupling. There are numerous ways of doing this, such as information modelling and metamodelling. ObjectSecurity has spent several years researching model driven concepts (esp. for security policies) and we believe that this is doable as long as everyone 100% sticks to the conventions. Contact us if you would like to know more about this. Any comments are also more than welcome.