Formalizing Web Service Choreographies

Current Web service choreography proposals, such as BPEL4WS, BPSS, WSFL, WSCDL or WSCI, provide notations for describing the message flows in Web service collaborations. However, such proposals remain at the descriptive level, without providing any kind of reasoning mechanisms or tool support for checking the compatibility of Web services based on the proposed notations. In this paper we present the formalization of one of these Web service choreography proposals (WSCI), and discuss the benefits that can be obtained by such formalization. In particular, we show how to check whether two or more Web services are compatible to interoperate or not, and, if not, whether the specification of adaptors that mediate between them can be automatically generated —hence enabling the communication of (a priori) incompatible Web services.