Synchronized Data Acquisition from Web Services Serving at Disparate Rates

Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) have provided improved means of serving data in business-to-business (B2B) communications. Usually, however, the flow of data from services is limited by the service provider, and different providers may limit to vastly different rates, leading to different quality of services (QoSs) for each. In some cases, the data from these various providers must be synchronized by the service consumer, for example, when that data comes from different marketplaces (e.g. Amazon or Ebay) and provides such information as prices, item sales ranks, and quantities. The acquisition of that data from each service must be reasonably synchronized if that data is to be reliably compared. This paper addresses the problems associated with this synchronization when QoS differs greatly between services but the quality of the data and the services themselves vary as well.