JWSR, Volume 4, Number 1, January-March 2007
Official Publication of the Information Resources Management Association
Published: Quarterly in Print and Electronically
ISSN: 1545-7362
EISSN: 1546-5004


EDITORIAL PREFACE:

"Special Issue: Web Services Discovery and Composition"

M. Brian Blake, Georgetown University, USA
William K. Cheung, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong
Andreas Wombacher, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland
Kwok Ching Tsui, Hong Kong Baptist University &
Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp. Ltd., Hong Kong
Liang-Jie Zhang, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA

Services discovery and composition are among the key issues that decide the success of Web services technology. This issue of the International Journal of Web Services research (JWSR) highlights the theme of a special issue: “Web Services Discovery and Composition.” Guest Editors M. Brian Blake, William K. Cheung, Andreas Wombacher, and Kwok Ching Tsui organized four articles in this special issue focused primarily on various approaches on services discovery and composition.

RESEARCH PAPERS

PAPER ONE:

"Web Service Planner (WSPR): An Effective and Scalable Web Service Composition Algorithm"

Oh, S. C.
Lee, D.
Kumara, S. R. T.

As the emergence of service-oriented architecture provides a major boost for e-commerce agility, the number of available Web services is rapidly increasing. However, when there are a large number of Web services available and no single Web service satisfies the given request, one has to compose multiple Web services to fulfill the goal. In this article, toward this problem, we present an AI planning-based Web service composition algorithm named as WSPR. We evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of WSPR using two publicly available test sets EE05 and ICEBE05. In addition, we analyze the two test sets and suggest several improvements to benchmark Web service composition better.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=6570

PAPER TWO:

"Web Service Discovery and Composition for Virtual Enterprises"

Dorn, J.
Hrastnik, P.
Rainer, A.

One main characteristic of virtual enterprises are short-term collaborations between business partners to provide efficient and individualized services to customers. The MOVE project targets at a methodology and a software framework to support such flexible collaborations based on process oriented design and communication by Web services. MOVE framework supports the graphical design and verification of business processes, the execution and supervision of processes in transaction-oriented environment, and the dynamic composition and optimization of processes. A business process may be composed from a set of Web services, deployed itself as Web service and executed in the framework. The composition of processes from Web services is implemented with methods from AI-planning. We apply answer set programming (ASP) and map Web service descriptions and customer requests into the input language of the ASP software DLV. Composition goals and constraints guide a composition challenge. We show the performance of our program and give some implementation details. Finally we conclude with some insights.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=6571

PAPER THREE:

"BITS: A Binary Tree Based Web Service Composition System"

Zhou, A.
Huang, S.
Wang, X.

In current service-oriented applications, each individual Web service usually cannot satisfy users?requests for Web services, but the functionalities of different Web services may be integrated to accomplish requested task. This process is called Web service composition, and the resulted service is called composite Web service. The discovery and composition of Web services are two important research issues. In this article, a Web service composition system, BITS, which won the championship of the ICEBE05 contest due to its outstanding performance, is introduced. BITS is implemented based on a binary tree which is used to organize Web services. In this system, some search strategies and optimization techniques are developed for efficient service discovery and service composition. Extensive experiments are conducted for performance study, and the results show the efficiency and effectiveness of the methods adopted in BITS.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=6572

PAPER FOUR:

"A Flexible Directory Query Language for the Efficient Processing of Service Composition Queries"

Binder, W.
Constantinescu, I. Faltings, B.

Service composition is a major challenge in an open environment populated by large numbers of heterogeneous services. In such a setting, the efficient interaction of directory-based service discovery with service composition engines is crucial. In this article we present a Java-based directory that offers special functionality enabling effective service composition. In order to optimize the interaction of the directory with different service composition algorithms exploiting application-specific heuristics, the directory supports user-defined selection and ranking functions written in a declarative query language. Inside the directory queries are transformed and compiled to JVM bytecode which is dynamically linked into the directory. The compiled query enables a best-first search of matching directory entries, efficiently pruning the search space.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=6573

PAPER FIVE:

"A Dynamic Two-Phase Commit Protocol for Adaptive Composite Services"

Yu, W.
Pu, C.

Next-generation applications based on Web services impose additional requirements on the use of coordination protocols with various optimizations, such as the two-phase commit protocol (2PC). This article analyses the well-known 2PC optimizations resumed commit and resumed abort, and presents an improved 2PC that is suitable for Web-service-based applications. More specifically, the protocol allows every individual service provider to choose dynamically the most appropriate presumption for any distributed transaction. This new capability is especially useful when a composite Web service is integrating component services that make different presumptions in their commit protocols. The protocol does not introduce extra overhead to the previous 2PC variants in terms of number of messages and log records, and it is easy to understand and realize. Our simulation shows that the choice of appropriate presumption has significant influence on system performance, and that in some heterogeneous settings, combining different presumptions in individual transactions outperforms adopting only one single presumption.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=6574

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For full copies of the above articles, check for this issue of the International Journal of Web Services Research (JWSR) in your Institution's library.
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