Business Process Modeling for Web-services Orchestration

Abstract

The concept of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the latest design paradigm for IT systems. The aim is to use Web services as the basic building blocks, which provide reusable functionalities that are invocable of the Internet. The initial Web service technology stack around WSDL, SOAP, and UDDI allows to technically realize the provision and usage of Web services. However, the support for the detection of the suitable Web services for a specific client application is limited to manual inspection. To better support this for SOA applications with larger numbers of available Web services which can be expected in real-world scenarios, the emerging concept of Semantic Web Services (SWS) develops for the automated discovery, composition and execution of Web services. This article provides an overview on the SWS approach as well as the latest technology developments. Web service Orchestration describes how Web services can interact at the message level, including the business logic and execution order of the interactions. With Web services Orchestration, the process is always controlled from the perspective of one of the business parties.