WebBIS: AN INFRASTRUCTURE FOR AGILE INTEGRATION OF WEB SERVICES

Abstract

The Web is changing the way organizations are conducting their business. Businesses are rushing to provide modular applications, called Web services, that can be programmatically accessed through the Web. Despite the tremendous developments achieved so far, one of the most important, yet untapped potential, is the use of Web services as facilitators for inter-organizational cooperation. This promising concept, known as Web service composition, is gaining momentum as the potential silver bullet for the envisioned Semantic Web. The development of such integrated services has so far been ad hoc, time-consuming, and requires extensive low-level programming efforts. In this paper, we present WebBIS (Web Base of Internet-accessible Services), a generic framework for composing and managing Web services. We combine the object-oriented and active rules paradigms for such a task. We also provide a ontology-based framework for organizing the Web service space. We finally propose a peer-to-peer mechanism for reporting, propagating, and reacting to changes in Web services.