A service creation environment based on end to end composition of Web services

Abstract

The demand for quickly delivering new applications is increasingly becoming a business imperative today. Application development is often done in an ad hoc manner, without standard frameworks or libraries, thus resulting in poor reuse of software assets. Web services have received much interest in industry due to their potential in facilitating seamless business-to-business or enterprise application integration. A web services composition tool can help automate the process, from creating business process functionality, to developing executable workflows, to deploying them on an execution environment. However, we find that the main approaches taken thus far to standardize and compose web services are piecemeal and insufficient. The business world has adopted a (distributed) programming approach in which web service instances are described using WSDL, composed into flows with a language like BPEL and invoked with the SOAP protocol. Academia has propounded the AI approach of formally representing web service capabilities in ontologies, and reasoning about their composition using goal-oriented inferencing techniques from planning. We present the first integrated work in composing web services end to end from specification to deployment by synergistically combining the strengths of the above approaches. We describe a prototype service creation environment along with a use-case scenario, and demonstrate how it can significantly speed up the time-tomarket for new services.

Optimizing Service Selection and Allocation in Situational Computing Applications

“…In the latter case [4]- [6], [48], complex applications are specified as workflow processes and the best available set of services are dynamically selected at run-time by solving an optimization problem. The Semantic Web and AI approach is very flexible since an application schema is built automatically or semi-automatically from a high level specification of the required functionality [49]- [52], but it is usually computation intensive and, from the QoS point of view, only sub-optimal solutions can be identified [49].…”

Service Composition Quality Evaluation in SPICE Platform

“…For example, Fuji et al [13] use "semantic graphs" derived from natural language descriptions, while in [28] semantic interfaces are annotated with service goals are used to compose services. A web services composition methodology is achieved by stitching together semantically-annotated web service components in a BPEL flow [27], while a composition of services as a directed graph where nodes refer to web services was presented in [10]. Aggregation of non-functional service properties then becomes a key decision factor for discriminating among a set of suitable service compositions.…”

Dissection of a Visualization On-Demand Server

“…Service composition [12] enables resources to be merged and responds more quickly and cost-effectively to changing market conditions. Service helps not having license/ software distribution issues, and can reduce distribution costs, piracy and reverse engineering.…”