Dynamic web service composition with MDE approaches and ontologies

Abstract

The use of the Internet as a way to publish new applications and deliver new functionalities has consolidated the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and web services technology for creating software systems. Once web services technology enables a high degree of autonomy and interoperability, it provides the atomic elements for development of large distributed software systems following a SOA philosophy. Thanks to SOA, web services can be composed and reused through a composition process for creating a new service with new functionalities. However, SOA is not enough to concept and design complex software systems. Recently, new paradigms are being developed to deal with the increasing complexity in the development, maintenance and evolution of software systems. Among the new paradigms, Model Driven Engineering (MDE) and the Ontology stands out as the most promising for handling complex software systems. In this paper, we present an approach based on MDE, Ontology and SOA philosophy to concept and design robust software systems and implement them as a composite web service. For this purpose, models powered by ontology and SOA capture the business logics, after these models are transformed in web services or composite web services. When a web service crashes or fails, a dynamic composition process assures reliability thanks to matching of models and web services. A case study is presented to illustrate our approach. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media.