On Compatibility of Web Services

To an increasing extend business processes run across the borders of individual enterprises. Thus, there is a need to map each local subprocess into a self-contained component; a distributed business process arises from composition of such component via standardized communication protocols. The Web service approach provides a standardized, platform independent and widely accepted concept of components and composition for distributed systems of all kinds. This approach comes along together with group of technologies to describe precisely the structure of one Web service and the composition of a set of Web services. Although the technological basement is given, there is a lot of open questions, e. g. semantic compatibility of two Web services. This paper abstracts from concrete syntax of any proposed language definition. Instead, we apply Petri nets to model Web services. Thus, we are able to reason about essential properties, e. g. usability of a Web service – our notion of a quality criterion. Based on this framework, we discuss and define a criterion for semantic compatibility of Web services.