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

Agarwal V., Dasgupta K., Karnik N.1-59593-046-9

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 work ows, to deploying them on an execution environment. However, we and that the main approaches taken thus far to standardize and compose web services are piecemeal and insucient. The business world has adopted a (distributed) programming approach in which web service instances are described using WSDL, composed into ows with a language likeBPEL 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 ♀rst integrated work in composing web services end to end from specifcation 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 signi♀cantly speed up the time-to-market for new services.