Composing web services for large-scale tasks - Internet Computing, IEEE

Web services give users access to various information-management services that help them gather, organize, and manage Webbased information. However, it’s currently impractical for users to properly manage and execute the many steps required to retrieve, analyze, and visualize information for large-scale tasks, such as performing a multisource intelligence gathering and analysis task or building an automatically updated Web portal. Assuming users do achieve success in such large-scale information, management tasks, it’s unlikely that they’d be able to quickly adapt and reuse the many steps involved for other tasks and environments. Currently, Web services research focuses on developing mechanisms to describe individual services, locate them in a network environment, and access them based on functionalities and constraints. However, to fully realize Web services’ potential flexibility and adaptability, we must combine various services to enable large-scale task management. To this end, we propose Eurasia (Exploring, Understanding, and Recording Analysis Steps in Information-Management Applications), a high-level system that helps users quickly explore and test various Web services so that they can compose large-scale applications. Eurasia evolved from our development of GeoWorlds (www.isi.edu/geoworlds), a Web-based system that makes various network information-management services easily accessible to users.1 We began the GeoWorlds project in 1998; our work on it provided insight into several key aspects of user behavior in Web-based environments, which in turn inspired our work on Eurasia.