Discovery and Mediation Approaches for Management of Net-Centric Web Services

Abstract

This paper describes an Integrated Web Services Brokering System (IWB) to support the automated discovery and application integration of Web Services. In contrast to more static broker approaches that deal with specific data servers, our approach creates a dynamic knowledge base from Web Service interface specifications. This assists with brokering of requests to multiple data providers even when those providers have not implemented a community standard interface or have implemented different versions of a community standard interface. A specific context we illustrate here is the domain of meteorological and oceanographic (MetOc) Web Services. Our approach includes the use of specific domain ontologies and has evaluated the use of case-based classification in the IWB to support automated Web Services discovery. It was also demonstrated that the mediation approach could be extended to OGC Web Coverage Services.