Intelligent Web Service – From Web Services to .Plug&Play. Service Integration

The service oriented architecture and its implementation by Web services have reached a considerable degree of maturity and also a wide adoption in different application domains. This is true for the R&D as well as for the industrial community. Standards for the description, activation, and combination of Web services have been established; UDDI registries are in place for the management of services, and development environments support the software engineer in the creation of Web services.

However, the major benefit of service oriented architectures, the loose coupling of services, is still seldom explored in real world settings. The reason is the heterogeneity on different levels within the service oriented architecture. The heterogeneity problems reach from the semantics of service descriptions to compatibility problems between workflows, which have to be connected via service interfaces. In spite of compatible service signatures, workflows might, for example, not be compatible in their semantics.

This talk discusses challenges and solutions for a real .Plug&Play. service infrastructure, i.e. a Web service infrastructure, where integration of new Web services becomes as simple and straightforward as plugging a USB stick into your laptop. To achieve this goal various issues have to be addressed:

Semantics of services as a foundation for intelligent service mediation and usage

Effective, automatic, and intelligent service discovery taking into account application context

Dynamic context-aware composition of services into processes

The challenges and approaches for a “Plug&Play” service infrastructure are illustrated with a real world example.