WEB SERVICES COMMUNITIES - Concepts & Operations

Abstract

This paper discusses the concepts and operations related to the specification and management of a community of Web services, respectively. Web services offering the same functionality are gathered into one community, independently of their origins. The community is led by a master component, which is responsible among others for attracting new Web services to the community, retaining existing Web services in the community, and identifying the Web services in the community that will participate in composite Web services. The identification of these Web services is based on the contract-net protocol. 1 Similar Web services and Web services with a similar functionality are interchangeably used.