Web Services Composition: A Story of Models, Automata, and Logics

The web services paradigm, which finds roots in Service-Oriented Computing [1, 12], promises to enable rich, flexible, and dynamic interoperation of highly distributed and heterogeneous web-hosted services. Substantial progress has already been made towards this goal (e.g., emerging standards such as SOAP, WSDL, BPEL) and industrial technology (e.g., IBM’s WebSphere Toolkit, Sun’s Open Net Environment and JiniTM Network technology, Microsoft’s .Net and Novell’s One Net initiatives, HP’s e-speak). Several research efforts are already underway that build on or take advantage of the paradigm, including the DAMLS/OWL-S program [9, 10, 7, 13], the Semantic Web Services Initiative (SWSI) [14] andWeb Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) [16] groups, and automata-based models for web services [5, 8, 4].