Information, Knowledge, and Task Web Services Using Generic Service Representatives

In this paper, we propose an extension to the SOA model by adding a new component called a Service Representative. This SOA component, which simulates an enterprise agent, is modeled by a generic software agent and stays at the client site to be employed by different service providers. Moreover, different types of web services are required to model actual services in the business domain. Consequently, we propose to categorize business services into Information, Knowledge, and Task services. While a service client calls an information service to receive processed data, a knowledge service provides enterprise knowledge for either the service client or service representative. However, a service provider can assign a task to the service representative to process the client’s data locally. In this paper, we introduce a prototype implementation of the extended SOA model that we used to develop a healthcare enterprise system which offers different types of services.