A Collaborative Approach for Interactive Web Services Composition

With the emergence of Web Services technology, people and organizations are increasingly turning to Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) to design and build their applications. The SOC promises to enable rich, flexible and dynamic interoperation of loosely coupled web services. The necessity to combine the functionality of several web services known as web services composition is one of the main current research topics in SOC field. Some of works focus on the web services composition as a means of satisfying the requirements of different parties, whereas others focus on the development of standards and formalisms for composition. Composition formalism can be executable or conceptual. Executable formalisms are languages such as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). Although, these formalisms describe coordination and collaboration between services, they are essentially technical, developer-oriented and incomprehensible by users. To address this problem, conceptual formalisms based on goal-oriented models are proposed by the requirement engineering community. Satisfaction is an active research topic in the marketing literature. It uses the behavioral theories to study the customer?s satisfaction. In the Goal Oriented Requirement Engineering (GORE) works, satisfaction refers to ?Hardgoal? and ?Softgoal? satisfaction. Hardgoals are goals where satisfaction can be established by using formal verification techniques whereas softgoals cannot be satisfied in a clear-cut sense but only satisfied when thresholds of some precise criteria are reached. Currently in the SOC context, satisfaction is addressed at two perspectives. The first perspective is concerned with the user request satisfaction and is ensured thanks to the variability concept, whereas the second perspective is related to provider and consumer relationship through Service Level Agreement (SLA). With the emergence of interactive composition, the end-user is involved in the development process in a collaborative way. Although, we may better reconcile between the business and technique field, however, the collaborative composition yields to a further technical difficulties caused by the heterogeneity of models used by the different users. The main objective of this research project is to develop an ontological conceptualization of the variability in the context of interactive composition of services based on a large variety of heterogeneous models. Hence, the interactive service composition could implement any type of business logic so it will cover a large number of fields. In this project, a special emphasis will be given to the healthcare. During this research project, tools, measures and guidelines will be developed to carry out the tasks successfully.