Deriving artefact-centric interfaces for overloaded web services

Abstract

We present a novel framework and algorithms for the analysis of Web service interfaces to improve the efficiency of application integration in wide-spanning business networks. Our approach addresses the notorious issue of large and overloaded operational signatures, which are becoming increasingly prevalent on the Internet and being opened up for third-party service aggregation. Extending upon existing techniques used to refactor service interfaces based on derived artefacts of applications, namely business entities, we propose heuristics for deriving relations between business entities, and in turn, deriving permissible orders in which operations are invoked. As a result, service operations are refactored on business entity CRUD which then leads to behavioural models generated, thus supportive of fine-grained and flexible service discovery, composition and interaction. A prototypical implementation and analysis of web services, including those of commercial logistic systems (FedEx), are used to validate the algorithms and open up further insights into service interface synthesis.