Behavior-aware, Unified Service Discovery

Composite services commonly expose the choreography of message exchanges realized by their constituent services through appropriate descriptions and interfaces. Such information is very useful in deciding whether a composite service fully meets the behavioral requirements of a specific application or not. However, expressing behavioral requirements towards a service is currently a challenging task, often requiring the use of complex semantic annotations and the employment of related supporting technologies. Moreover, choreography descriptions and interfaces may be expressed in various formats and they are published in various types of registries, repositories, or networks. These issues hinder the applicability and effectiveness of behavior-aware service discovery. To overcome the aforementioned obstacles and to promote interoperability at the service discovery level, we propose in this paper a novel, unified solution towards expressing and evaluating behavioral requirements towards services. In our approach, queries are conveniently created in a visual manner with the use of UML; they are translated into a generic XMLbased query language, namely USQL; they are uniformly executed in a wide variety of target registries, repositories, and networks, by means of a powerful service search engine; and they can be matched against different types of service choreography descriptions.