Building Applications Using End to End Composition of Web Services

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 20

Intelligent Systems Demonstrations

Two different approaches have been taken to standardize and compose web services. The business world has adopted a distributed systems approach in which web service instances are described using WSDL, composed into flows with a language like BPEL,and invoked with the SOAP protocol. Academia has propounded the AI approach of formally representing web service capabilities in ontologies, and reasoning about their functional composition using goaloriented inferencing techniques from planning. These approaches by themselves are piecemeal, and insufficient. Our system takes an end to end view that synergistically combines the AI approach and the distributed programming approach currently adopted by academia and industry respectively. It drives the composition process right from specification of the business process, through creation of desired functionality using planning techniques, through generation of a deployable workflow by selection and binding of appropriate service instances, to finally deploying and running the composite service. This integrated solution achieves the best of both worlds and provides scalability to the composition process.