Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER
9
Future Perspectives
R
ecent years have witnessed the emergence, maturity, and wide
application of service-oriented architecture (SOA). Meanwhile, build-
ing business and scientific workflows in SOA has become an important
means for service reuse and process management. To fill the gap
between the academic research and the real-life applications, we
have discussed in this topic several service composition methods and
their applications in business, scientific, and medical service systems.
This topic has provided a detailed discussion about why Web
service and service-based workflow technologies are essential in both
business and scientific domains. It has presented some fundamental
methods such as Petri nets and social network analysis methods to
advance the theory and applications of workflow design and Web
service composition. It has also presented real applications of the
developed theory and methods to such platforms as personalized
healthcare and biomedical grids. With a perspective from both acade-
mia and industry, we hope that this topic would provide insights to
researchers and practitioners, and stimulates peers in this field to solve
many more problems of their interest and concern.
On one hand, after more than one decade research and development,
there are still many challenges to tackle while bringing the workflow
technology and services computing together, especially in a rapidly
evolving IT environment. On the other hand, the emergence of new
computing paradigms, especially cloud computing and social computing,
has shed some light on more collaborative, intelligent, and big-data-aware
