A Web Services-Oriented Approach to Unlock Information

This work proposes to use Web services to turn information into actions by leveraging and unlocking the informational assets of an organization. Indeed, Web services allow costeffective composition and re-engineering of business processes because of their ability to connect applications, systems, and organization partners through the Internet-based standards (XML, SOAP, UDDI). The work consists of developing a process to generate interfaces to the knowledge in terms of information an organization possesses. These interfaces, implemented as Web services, are callable through the Internet. The proposed process is based on a new concept called factual dependency. Factual dependencies allow aggregations of attributes describing business objects and coordination artifacts that are affected by the same business events. Each resulting aggregation leads to a lowest level of granularity Web services. These Web services are then registered in a private or public UDDI to be discovered and (re)used at request to compose or re-engineer any internal or external business process. Unlike the approaches and tools that generate, in a spontaneous way or on a case-by-case basis, Web services from the complex and redundant elements of the information system, the proposed process generates Web services for the business objects and coordination artifacts as identified at the highest abstraction level of a business model. Indeed, the elements of the highest abstraction level that is the universe of discourse are unique and not redundant. The uniqueness and non-redundancy allows a generation, in a top-down-incremental approach with fewer analysts’ intuition, of a comprehensive set of Web services reflecting the actual and the potential activities of the organization.