Service Discovery and Component Reuse with Semantic Interfaces

Current trends in distributed computing and e-business processing suggest that many applications are evolving towards Service Oriented Computing (SOC) with technologies such as Web services. Services are autonomous platform-independent computational elements, and we observe an increasing need for core SOC technologies for dynamic discovery, selection, and composition of services. However, such technologies are often based on syntactic descriptions of the services and of their interfaces, which are insufficient to ensure that desired liveness properties are satisfied. In this paper, we propose an approach for the description, discovery, and selection of services based on role modeling and goal expressions that enables the definition of semantic interfaces and the evaluation of liveness properties. The same mechanisms also enable component reuse. We discuss how UML 2.0 can support the modeling of both the services and the desired properties. The approach is illustrated with telephony services.