Towards semi-automated workflow-based aggregation of web services

Abstract

Service aggregation is one of the main issues in the emerging area of service-oriented computing. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the long-term objective of lifting service aggregation from manual hand-crafting to a semi-automated engineered process. We present a methodology which, given a set of service contracts, tries to construct an aggregation of such services. Service contracts include a description of the service behaviour (expressed by a YAWL workflow), as well as an (ontology-annotated) signature. The core aggregation process basically performs a control-flow and an (ontology-aware) data-flow analysis of a set of YAWL workflows to build the contract of an aggregated service. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.