Web Services: Foundation and Composition

Today both business analysts and information systems engineers attribute a great potential to Web services as a vehicle to simplify the interoperability of services offered by different organizations in electronic business scenarios. In this paper, the Service Oriented Architecture is explained as the foundation of this new technology. The main implications and benefits of this architecture and the new possibilities offered are discussed. Since standards play an increasingly important role in this new technology, new and upcoming standards for an implementation of this architecture are summarized; these combined standards are known as Web services technology. Since the real potential for Web services is facilitating business processes, a recently specified framework for defining and executing business processes in a Web services environment is presented. Rather than solely discussing the strategic benefits of Web services, this paper also tries to point out current technological deficiencies and recent approaches to overcome them.