A Blueprint of Service Engineering

The rationale behind service oriented computing is to lift inter-organisational integration on a higher level of effectiveness and efficiency. E-services promise to offer means for floating modularisation of arbitrary organisational assets into components that can be dynamically offered, discovered, negotiated, accessed and composed in an open environment. From a technical point of view electronic services are software systems that have to be implemented on top of conventional information and communication technology. As an important step into that direction, the Web Service architecture has laid the foundation for interoperable communication between arbitrary systems. This extended abstract outlines an approach to plan, build and run application-level services on top. Therefore, a fundamental notion of service, originating from distributed systems, is being extended by a specific concept of cooperative interaction processes. Accordingly, an application-level service model and corresponding service engineering mechanisms are proposed that are being realised as middleware based on OGSA Web Services and BPEL4WS processes.