Title: Message mediation in composite Web Services

Authors: Christoph Bussler

Addresses: Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG), Galway, Ireland

Abstract: A composite Web Service (WS) provides higher-level functionality by utilising one or more (composite or non-composite) individual WS that it invokes in a well-defined order. In general, each WS defines its own schema of its input as well as its output messages based on the data model of its underlying implementation. In consequence, a composite WS must be able to interpret every message definition schema of every WS it invokes and has to transform those into either its own messages or the messages of other WS it subsequently invokes to enable frictionless data flow between them. Since the message definitions of each WS follow in general a different data model based on a specific underlying ontology or data model, messages require transformation in order for the composite WS to be semantically meaningful. This article characterises the problem of message mediation in context of composite WS and provides an advanced and explicit methodology for including message mediation in composite WS definitions.

Keywords: composite web services; message mediation; ontology; data models.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWET.2006.010421

International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, 2006 Vol.2 No.4, pp.373 - 395

Published online: 20 Jul 2006 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article