A UML-based Rich Service Description Language for Automatic Service Discovery of Heterogeneous Service Partners

Service-oriented computing (SOC) emerges as a promising trend solving many issues in distributed software development. Following the essence of SOC, service descriptions are defined by the service partners based on current standards, e.g., WSDL [15]. However, these standards are mostly structural and do not provide any behavioral description, which may lead to inaccurate service discovery results. There is a requirement for a rich service description language for service partners that encompasses the structural as well as behavioral information in the service description. Furthermore, service discovery based on an automatic matching of these comprehensive service descriptions is a complex task, which is further complicated through the heterogeneity of the service partners’ domains in terms of different underlying ontologies. In this paper, we propose a rich service description language based on UML, which allows the specification of structural and behavioral features of a service. In addition, we also briefly discuss how some existing matching approaches can be extended to define an automatic matching mechanism for rich service descriptions resolving the underlying heterogeneity.