Abstract
Web services have been employed in a wide range of applications and have become a key technology in developing business operations on the Web. In order to leverage on the use of Web services, Web service operations such as discovery, composition, and interoperability need to be fully supported. Several approaches have been proposed for each of these operations but these have advantages and disadvantages as well as varying levels of suitability for different applications. This leads to a motivation to explore and to compare current approaches as well as to highlight problems of the operations and their possible solutions. In this chapter, an introduction, a brief survey, problems and possible solutions to the three Web service operations mentioned above are discussed. The research opportunities and possible future directions on Web service are also presented.
TopBackground
The Web service model is represented in figure 1 showing, the interaction between a service requester, service providers, and a service registry which is a Web service discovery system (Fensel & Bussler, 2002). The three components interact with each other via publishing, discovery, and binding operations. This section will introduce the background and a brief survey of operations including discovery and composition which are for Web service discovery purpose and interoperability which is for Web service invocation purpose.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Web service discovery: is a process that locates advertised Web services to satisfy a requested Web service’s requirement
Web: service composition is a process that combines the total or partial function of multiple web services, to accomplish a determined goal.
The Semantic Web: is an extension of the current World Wide Web through the use of semantic technology to describe the Web so that it can be both understood by humans and interpreted automatically by machines.
Semantic Web service: is a Web service that uses semantic Web technology to describe the service instead of using syntactic technology such as Web Service Description Language.
Web service invocation: is an action whereby a Web service is invoked to carry out its function
Web Service: is a software component representing a service which is deployed in the Web platform supporting automatic interaction between machines over a network.
AI Planning based Web Service Composition: is an approach to Web Service Composition based on a determined start and end state of a service function.