Web Services Contracts

Marco Comerio, Research Fellow at UniversitA degli Studi di Milano Bicocca (Milan, Italy), will speak on "Web Service Contracts: Specification, Selection and Composition" at the Austrlaian National Unviersity, 17 December 2010:

Web Service Contractsa"Specification, Selection and Composition

Marco Comerio

CSIRO ICT

DATE: 2010-12-17
TIME: 11:00:00 - 12:00:00
LOCATION: CSIT Seminar Room, N101
CONTACT: tom.rowlands@csiro.au

ABSTRACT:
Web services promise universal interoperability and integration of services developed by independent providers to execute business processes by discovering and composing services distributed over the Internet. This means that a key factor to build complex and valuable processes among cooperating organizations relies on the efficiency of discovering appropriate Web services and composing them. The increasing availability of Web services that offer similar functionalities requires mechanisms to go beyond the pure functional discovery and composition of Web services.

A promising solution towards the automatic enactment of valuable processes consists in enhancing Web service discovery and composition with the evaluation of semantic contracts that define non-functional properties (NFPs) and applicability conditions associated with a Web service. Nevertheless, currently there is a lack of tools and algorithms that fully support this solution due to several open issues. First, existing languages do not show the expressivity necessary for Web service contract specifications. Second, there is a lack of standard languages that determines heterogeneity in Web service contract specifications raising interoperability issues. Third, pure semantic approaches to enhance Web service discovery allows for detailed descriptions but present performance problems due to current limitations of semantic tools when dealing with reasoning tasks. Fourth, Web service contract compatibility evaluation is not supported by existing composition tools when combining different services from different providers.

This talk addresses these open issues and proposes solutions in terms of models, algorithms and tools.
BIO:
Marco Comerio is a Research Fellow at UniversitA degli Studi di Milano Bicocca. He received his laurea degree in Computer Science in 2006 and his PhD in 2010 at the same university. Since 2006 to 2009 He participated in the European IST project n. 27347 SEEMP (Single European Employment Market-Place) and in the Italian FIRB project RBNE05XYPW NeP4B (Networked Peers for Business). His current research activity is mainly in the field of Service Oriented Computing. The main results of his research activity are: (i) the definition of a meta-model to semantically describe non-functional properties (NFPs); (ii) the definition of techniques to allow the management of heterogeneous service contracts along the Web service selection and composition activities; (iii) the definition of an approach to NFP-based hybrid multidimensional ranking of Semantic Web Services; (iv) the implementation of the approach in a WSMO-compliant ranker. He has published his research results in about 20 papers in international conferences and journals.