Conflict Resolution in Web Service Federations

Web services are expected to become the foundation of highly-dynamic distributed business computing architectures. By building upon the Internet-based technologies that changed the face of business computing over the last decade, web services are a significant step towards a truly universal infrastructure for e-business. Focusing on the case of opportunistic virtual enterprises, this paper first considers the widely-held view that they can be modelled by web service federations and then highlights the fact that, in that case, similar problems to those faced in attempts to federate databases will also stand in the way of virtual enterprise formation. A lightweight, unobtrusive approach is described to improve the chances that web service federations can be formed unimpededly, thereby reducing the cost of virtual enterprise formation and operations. Therefore, the paper contributes an enabling technology to facilitate an important, and highly dynamic, kind of e-business.