Process Oriented Discovery of Business Partners

Emerging technologies and industrial standards in the field of Web services enable a much faster and easier cooperation of distributed partners. With the increasing number of enterprises that offer specific functionality in terms of Web services, discovery of matching partners becomes a serious issue. At the moment, discovery of Web services generally is based on meta-information (e. g. name, business category) and some technical aspects (e. g. interface, protocols). But, this selection might be to coarse grained for dynamic application integration, and there is much more information available. This paper describes a method to discover business partners based on the comparison of their behavior – specified in terms of their published Web service process models.