A Framework to Engineer Communities of Web Services

Dr Jamal Bentahar

A Web service is an accessible application that humans, software agents, and other applications in general can discover, compose, and invoke in order to satisfy users' needs like a hotel booking. Current practices indicate that Web services providing the same functionality are to be gathered into one community, independently of their origins and the way they carry out this functionality. In this talk, a framework for specifying communities of Web services and the underlying engineering operations will be presented. The concepts to use, the architecture to select, the operation to script, and the deployment to track will be addressed. Two protocols framing the interactions in an environment of communities of Web services namely the Web Services Community Development Protocol and the Contract-Net Protocol will be presented. Finally, the role software agents can play to specify these Web services and to manage their respective communities will be stressed. The use of these agents which are able to argue, negotiate, and reason about Web services helps such Web services in being better organized within communities and in achieving the goals for which they are conceived.

About the speaker: http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~bentahar/