A Net-based Approach to Web Services Publication and Replaceability

Web services represent a promising technology for the development of distributed heterogeneous software systems. In this setting, a major issue is to establish whether two services can be used interchangeably in any context. To this aim, our paper first briefly reviews the results contained in a recent article by the same authors, where a suitable notion of behavioural equivalence for Web services was introduced. Our work then extends those results, in order to account for ontologybased service specifications. Next, a concrete example scenario – a car rental system – is presented, and it is then used to illustrate how the equivalence between services can be fruitfully employed for correctly addressing two prominent, modularity-related problems: The publication of correct service specifications and the replaceability of (sub)services.