Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER
3
Data-Driven Service
Composition
A
utomatic Web service composition is considered to be a key
technology in stimulating the Web evolving from an information-
delivering center to a function-offering platform to better support the
wide use of existing services. It is of great importance in service-
oriented architecture (SOA) because reusability is a key feature in
SOA to ensure the scalability and productivity. When new business
requirements emerge, solution designers should devise a composite
process that makes the best use of existing services, and SOA provides
a way to glue all components together with the least augmentation or
modification. Service composition techniques provide ways to devise a
composition of services that fulfills the requirement. There are a
number of studies on automatic Web service composition, but there
is not much on the linkage between requirements and services.
This chapter presents a data-based approach to provide guidance
for service (or process) composition with a given service portfolio in
mind. The data relations between business domain and service domain
are explored, and data mediation constructs are added to bridge the
existing artifacts. We use colored Petri nets as a formalism to represent
the data relations. Based on this formalism, three composition rules,
sequential, parallel, and choice composition rules, are proposed. Then,
