Protocol engineering for web services conversations
OA Location
Author(s)
Paurobally, S
Jennings, NR
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Although web services aim to bring about seamless and effective communication in a wide variety of Internet applications, the interactions between them are currently limited to simple request-response exchanges. However, in the longer term we believe this is unsustainable. In particular, we believe that more complex protocols for web service conversations are necessary if the participants are to tailor their needs and offers to the prevailing context and they are to coordinate multiple services in open and realistic environments. To this end, this paper combines and extends two recent web service languages, WS-Conversation Language (WSCL) and WS-Agreement, in order to obtain a method for engineering protocols of suffcient expressiveness for the next generation of exible and autonomous services. Specifically, we propose that the protocols include speech-acts as the individual messages and we show how to model such speech-acts as WS-Agreement schemas, which can,in turn, be imported into the specification of the protocols in WSCL. To demonstrate our approach we express a standard contracting protocol in the extended WSCL/WS-Agreement languages. Furthermore, we use statechart notation as a visual counterpart to help developers write clients that exibly interact with a service and to help users to better understand how to interact with a service. Finally, we show that the translation between statecharts and WSCL/WS-Agreement protocols is straightforward.
Date Issued
2005
Citation
Int J. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 2005, 18, pp.237-254
Start Page
237
End Page
254
Journal / Book Title
Int J. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence
Volume
18
Identifier
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/260157/
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Automation & Control Systems
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
Engineering, Multidisciplinary
Engineering, Electrical & Electronic
Computer Science
Engineering
AUTOMATION & CONTROL SYSTEMS
COMPUTER SCIENCE, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
ENGINEERING, ELECTRICAL & ELECTRONIC
ENGINEERING, MULTIDISCIPLINARY
web services
conversations
interaction protocols
WSCL
multi-agent systems
speech-acts
statecharts
WS-Agreement
Artificial Intelligence & Image Processing
08 Information And Computing Sciences
09 Engineering
Notes
keywords: web services, conversations, interaction protocols, WSCL, WS-Agreement.
Article Number
2