Dynamic Discovery of Composable Type Adapters for Practical Web Services Workflow

As the Web Services and Grid community adopt Semantic Web technology, we observe a shift towards higherlevel workflow composition and service discovery practices. While this provides excellent functionality to non-expert users, more sophisticated middleware is required to hide the details of service integration. By investigating a bioinformatics use case, we observe the need for Type Adaptor components to be inserted into workflows to harmonise syntactically incompatible interfaces. In this paper, we propose a generic Type Adaptor description that can be used in conjunction with existing service registries to facilitate automatic syntactic mediation. We demonstrate our implementation before evaluating both the translation approach we employ, and the relative cost of using a registry for Type Adaptor discovery.