Specification matching of web services using conditional graph transformation rules

Abstract

The ability of applications to dynamically discover required services is a key problem for Web Services. However, this aspect is not adequately supported by current Web Services standards. It is our objective to develop a formal approach allowing the automation of the discovery process. The approach is based on the matching of requestor's requirements for a useful service against service descriptions. In the present paper, we concentrate on behavioral compatibility. This amounts to check a relation between provided and required operations described via operation contracts. Graph transformation rules with positive and negative application conditions are proposed as a visual formal notation for contract specification. We establish the desired semantic relation between requestor and provider and prove the soundness and completeness of a syntactic notion of matching w.r.t. this relation. © Springer-Verlag 2004.