Semi-­Automated Adaptation of Service Interactions

Authors: 
Motahari Nezhad, H.R.; Martens, A. ; Cubera, F.; Casati, F.
Author: 
Motahari Nezhad, H
Martens, A
Cubera, F
Casati, F
Year: 
2007
Venue: 
Proc. WWW 07
URL: 
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/pfps/temp/web/www2007.org/papers/paper584.pdf
DOI: 
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/pfps/temp/web/www2007.org/papers/paper584.pdf
Citations: 
0
Citations range: 
n/a

In today's Web, many functionality-wise similar Web services are offered through heterogeneous interfaces (operation
definitions) and business protocols (ordering constraints defined on legal operation invocation sequences). The typical
approach to enable interoperation in such a heterogeneous
setting is through developing adapters. There have been approaches for classifying possible mismatches between service
interfaces and business protocols to facilitate adapter development. However, the hard job is that of identifying, given
two service speci cations, the actual mismatches between
their interfaces and business protocols.
In this paper we present novel techniques and a tool that
provides semi-automated support for identifying and resolution of mismatches between service interfaces and protocols,
and for generating adapter speci cation. We make the following main contributions: (i) we identify mismatches between service interfaces, which leads to finding mismatches
of type of signature, merge/split, and extra/missing messages; (ii) we identify all ordering mismatches between service protocols and generate a tree, called mismatch tree, for
mismatches that require developers' input for their resolution. In addition, we provide semi-automated support in
analyzing the mismatch tree to help in resolving such mis-matches. We have implemented the approach in a tool inside
IBM WID (WebSphere Integration Developer). Our experiments with some real-world case studies show the viability
of the proposed approach. The methods and tool are significant in that they considerably simplify the problem of
adapting services so that interoperation is possible.