Consumer-Specified Service License Selection and Composition

Service oriented computing represents the convergence of technology with an understanding of cross-organizational business processes. A service license describes the terms and conditions for the use and access of the service in a machine interpretable way. Generally, a service provider defines individual services with corresponding service licenses which consumers have to follow. Often, service consumers are interested in selecting a service based on certain licensing terms and/or in composing individual services depending on their needs. Thus, consumer-specified licenses become pivotal in service composition as this allows consumers to make a preference on what their service licenses should be and whether they can compose certain services together in a composition satisfying their specified licensing terms. In this paper, we propose an approach allowing service consumers to specify service licensing terms and select services that match licenses and implement this approach within a semi-automated service composition framework. Furthermore, we present a directional matchmaking algorithm to compare a consumer-specified service license with provider-specified service licenses and produce a composite service license satisfying the consumer-specified license.