Abstract
Web services are Internet-based application components published using standard interface description languages and universally available via uniform communication protocols (Singh & Huhns, 2005). Web services can be also considered the provision of services over electronic networks such as the Internet and wireless networks (Rust & Kannan, 2003). Web services is a new computing paradigm that has drawn increasing attention in information technology (Deitel, et al, 2004, p.13), information systems, and is playing a pivotal role in service computing and service intelligence (Singh & Huhns, 2005). Web services is a new business paradigm that is playing an important role in e-business, ecommerce and business intelligence (Wang, et al, 2006). The key motive for the rapid development of web services is the ability to discover services that fulfil users’ demands, negotiate service contracts and have the services delivered where and when the users request them (Tang, et al, 2007). The current research trend is to add intelligent techniques to web services to facilitate discovery, invocation, composition, and recommendation of web services (Wang, et al, 2006).
TopWeb Service Lifecycle: A Web Service Requester’S Perspective
From the perspective of computer science (Pressman, 2001), the software development lifecycle (SDLC) describes the life of a software product from its conception, to its implementation, delivery, use, and maintenance (Pfleeger & Atlee, 2006). A traditional SDLC mainly consists of seven stages: planning, requirements analysis, systems design, coding, testing, delivery and maintenance. Based on this, a web service lifecycle (WSLC) consists of the start of a web service (WS) request (He, et al, 2004) and the end of the WS transaction as well as its evolutionary stages that transform a web service from the start of the request to the end of the transaction.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Web services.: General speaking, web services are all the services available on the Web or the Internet from a business perspective. The first web services were information sources (Schneider, 2003). From a technological perspective, web services are Internet-based application components published using standard interface description languages and universally available via uniform communication protocols. Web services is an important application field of service intelligence and service-oriented computing.
Web service architecture.: A web service architecture is a high level description for web services, which is free of concrete implementation of a web service system but it is necessary for any implementation of a web service system.
Case-Based Reasoning (CBR): CBR is a reasoning paradigm based on previous experiences or cases; that is, a CBR system solves new problems by adapting solutions that were used to successfully solve old problems. Therefore, CBR is a kind of experience based reasoning. Case-based management, case-based engineering and case-based computing are more general paradigms than CBR.
Service oriented computing (SOC). SOC is a research field about service science: service intelligence, service technology, service engineering, service management, and service applications. It is the most general form of studying service in computing discipline.
Web service discovery.: The process of searching, matching a machine-processable description of a Web service. It aims to find appropriate web services to meet the requirement of the customers.
Intelligent system.: An intelligent system is a system that can imitate, automate some intelligent behaviors of human being. Expert systems and knowledge based systems are examples of intelligent systems. Currently, intelligent systems is a discipline that studies intelligent behaviors and their implementations as well as their impacts on human society.
Web service lifecycle (WSLC).: It consists of the start of a web service request, the end of web service transaction and its evolutionary stages that transform the web service from the start of the request to the end of transaction. Many activities are included in a WSLC such as web service discovery, composition, recommendation and management.
Multiagent systems.: A multiagent system is an intelligent system consisting of many intelligent agents. An intelligent agent can be considered as a counterpart of a human agent in intelligent systems. Google can be considered as an intelligent search agent.