A Service Creation Environment based on End to End Composition of Web Services

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-to-market for new services.

By: Vikas Agarwal, Koustuv Dasgupta, Neeran Karnik, Arun Kumar, Ashish Kundu, Sumit Mittal and Biplav Srivastava

Published in: RI04008 in 2004

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