Semantic and Syntactic Data Flow in Web Service Composition

Automation of Web service composition is one of the most interesting challenges facing the Service Oriented Computing today. From this challenge, many issues such as control flow, data flow, verification, execution monitoring, or recovery actions (e.g., compensation) follows. In this paper we focus on automated data flow in Web service composition. The semantic Web, as an evolving extension of the current Web, seems a key initiative to overcome the latter issue. However, even if some approaches focus on discovering potential semantic connections between Web services, few or none of these tackle implementations issues related to XML messages management at syntactic level. In this direction we present an approach for performing automated data flow in Web service composition by i) exploiting semantic matchmaking between Web service parameters (i.e., outputs and inputs) to enable their connection and interaction, and ii) adapting XML database solutions, specifically XML Schema mapping, to perform syntactic data transformation and integration of exchanged messages. Our system is implemented and interacting with Web services dedicated on a Telecom scenario. The preliminary evaluation results showed not only high efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach but also complementarity of the semantic matchmaking and syntactic mapping to achieving data flow in Web service composition.