Web services: the story so far - an academic and industrial account

Recent advances in networks, information and computation grids, and the Web have resulted in the proliferation of a multitude of physically distributed and autonomously developed component Web services. The W3C Web Services Architecture defines "Web service as a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine processible format (specifically WSDL) and other systems can interact with it in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards". So, web-services constitute a distributed computing infrastructure made up of many different systems trying to communicate over the Internet to virtually form a single logical system. Web-services are an effective means for linking loosely coupled systems together using a technology that does not bind to a particular component model, programming language or platform. Used according to the semantic web principles, semantic web services offer key integration capabilities in businesses as well as in scientific research over the Internet and corporate intranets, and so are applicable to a broad variety of applications including e-Enterprise, e-Business, e-Government, and e-Science. Correspondingly, the construction and deployment of composite services by combining and reusing independently developed component services is an important capability in the emerging Web-based computing infrastructure. In this presentation we will focus on a detailed analysis of existing discovery reasoning mechanisms and the current key solutions for composition of component services. We will conclude with current roadblocks and pilot applications.