Home
Links
People
Publications
|
Reengineering Software into Web Service-Oriented Architectures
Web services are interoperable, standards-based software components that can
be accessed over the Internet. They can be used as building blocks to construct
applications whose functionality may be simple or complex. They are widely
accepted in the IT industry -- leading IT companies such as Microsoft, Sun,
Oracle, SAP and BEA support web services. And they are becoming widely
accepted in business. Gartner Group expected 75 percent of enterprises with
more than $100 million in annual revenue to use web services by 2002. Web
services are self-contained, self-describing, modular, reusable applications
that can be published, located, invoked and even brokered over the Internet.
Web services are defined in terms of an stack of emerging XML-based open
standards for service description (WSDL), invocation (SOAP), publication and
discovery (UDDI, DISCO), and composition (WSFL).
Our goal in this research is to support the migration of existing software
systems to web service-based architectures. In support of this goal, we are
investigating several issues:
- Designing web service definition, publication, and composition
languages.
- Although there are various emerging standards for all those languages,
many improvements are needed and many issues remain unresolved.
- Wrapping software components into web services.
- Most web services come from existing software components rather than
being written from scratch. We will investigate the wrapping of web services
from various sources, such as HTML web sites, interface definitions of
distributed software components such as CORBA and DCOM, and EJB remote
objects.
- Composing web services.
- A major advantage of web services is that they can be composed
dynamically over the web, relying only on the HTTP protocol. We will study
service composition using XML schema inferences and semi-structured data
integration techniques.
- Discovering web services.
- We propose to define a similarity metric for web services in terms of the
structure of web service signatures and the semantic distance between tag
names. Signature matching of web services will depend on XML schema matching,
and the definition of semantic distance will use ontologies and other knowledge
representation techniques.
- Brokering web services.
- To realize the ultimate power of web services, it must be possible for
web services to dynamically collaborate and interoperate in order to produce
new web services. Our research aims to enable this through web service brokers
which accept complex requests, locate relevant sub-services from the web, and
use those services together to address an initial request.
Selected Publications
Jianguo Lu, John Mylopoulos. XIB: eXtensible Information Broker. International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools, Vol. 11, No. 1, March 2002. Special Issue on Intelligent Information Agents in the Internet and the WWW Age.
Sycara, K.; Widoff, S.; Klusch, M.; Lu, J..
LARKS: Dynamic Matchmaking Among Heterogeneous Software Agents in Cyberspace . Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Kluwer Academic, 5, p 173-203, 2002.
|