A Request Oriented Model for Web Services
Gaurav Mitra, Xuan Zhou, Athman Bouguettaya, Xumin Liu · 2013
The existing service modeling methodologies, such as WSDL and OWL-S, are service-oriented, which mainly focus on providing formalisms for the impor-tant features of a web service, including its functional-ity and QoS parameters. Conforming to these mod-els, users need to first find what the available ser-vices are, go through the descriptions, and then shape the request specifications based on the functionality of these services. These modeling methodologies do not cope with the ever-increasing number and vari-ety of web services, which introduces significant dif-ficulties to users when discovering and selecting ser-vices in a large scale and heterogeneous environment. To address this issue, we propose a request oriented model, where the formalisms focus on user expecta-tions and experiences on the usage of services, i.e., what a user wants as the result of accessing to ser-vices and what the user will experience during the service invocations. The model lays out a founda-tion for efficient and personalized service selection. It also provides formalisms for describing a service functionality, which supports service reasoning tasks to improve automation of service selection and usage. Based on the model, we propose a Web Service Re-quest Language (WSRL), which allows users to specify their requests in a declarative way. We also present the reasoning procedure that mediates the interac-tions between users and web services. 1