Pattern-based Evaluation of WS-CDL

The Web Service Choreography Description Language (WSCDL) has been put forward as language for capturing sets of web service interactions and their control and data dependencies, seen from a global perspective. However the suitability of WS-CDL for this purpose has not been assessed in a systematic manner. This paper presents such an assessment by adopting a two-pronged approach. First, the paper studies the relation between WS-CDL and π-calculus, a well-known formalism for specifying communicating systems with dynamic topologies. Second, WS-CDL is assessed in terms of its support for two collections of patterns: the Workflow Patterns which capture recurrent control-flow dependencies in business processes, and the Service Interaction Patterns which capture recurrent compositions of interactions between services.