Ontology-Based Compatibility Checking for Web Service Configuration Management

摘要

Service-oriented systems are constructed using Web services as first-class programmable units and subsystems and there have been many successful applications of such systems. However, there is a major unresolved problem with the software development and subsequent management of these applications and systems. Web service interfaces and implementations may be developed and changed autonomously, which makes traditional configuration management practices inadequate for Web services. Checking the compatibility of these programmable units turns out to be a difficult task. In this paper, we present a technique for checking compatibility of Web service interfaces and implementations based on categorizing domain ontology instances of service description documents. This technique is capable of both assessing the compatibility and identifying incompatibility factors of service interfaces and implementations. The design details of a system model for Web service compatibility checking and the key operator for evaluating compatibility within the model are discussed. We present simulation experiments and analyze the results to show the effectiveness and performance variations of our technique with different data source patterns.