Enhancing Engineering Methodology for Communities of Web Services.
Mohamed El-Menshawy, Jamal Bentahar, Rachida Dssouli · 2009
Abstract—Communities of web services have been proposed to gather web services having the same functionalities but possibly different nonfunctional properties. Current approaches into communities of web services focus on developing, managing and designing communities of web services through a suitable architecture, but can benefit from a stronger treatment of flexible interactions. These approaches ignore the collaboration and business-level contracts between various web services and the ability to formally delegate service to another web service within the same community. This paper presents a significant step towards enhancing communities of web services using an agent-based approach that synthesizes mentalistic states (e.g. goals, tasks), social commitments and argumentative dialogues for modeling and establishing communities of web services. This paper has three contributions: first, we extend the community structure with alliances structure to allow collaboration between various web services; second, we propose a new engineering methodology based on concepts of Tropos methodology for managing communities of web services with alliances structure; and third, we specify internal-organizational business interactions within web services in terms of commitments augmented with argumentative dialogues to reason about the validity of these commitments. We evaluate our methodology using a large existing case study of auto insurance claim processing. I.