A Conceptual Model for Recognition and Management of Web Services

摘要

Web services have been developed in recent years as a fundamental technique for the new generation of business-to-business (B2B) or enterprise application integration (EAI) applications. As perceived, the current development research about them is focusing on their underlying infrastructures such as SOAP, UDDI, WSDL, WSCL, BPEL, BPML, and among others. However, once such technical issues get matured and more Web services become available, the attention will naturally shift from deploying these services to recognizing and managing them. From the management perspective, this means that these services are recognized and controlled for fulfilling business objectives. In this paper, we propose an object-oriented modeling approach that addresses this issue by dividing required mechanisms into four layers: business objective, service agent, service composition, and service interaction ones. With this architecture, Web services are recognized and managed via the demanding of a business objective, the employment of a service agent that arranges a composition of required Web services for achieving the objective, and the confirmation of interactions among these services in achieving the objective. For specification, an object-oriented model is presented for each layer that describes the working detail of that layer. To illustrate, these models are applied in me fulfillment of a business travel plan that involves a set of business objectives to be achieved by various Web services offered by different providers.