A Broker for Universal Access to Web Services

Web service interfaces can potentially be discovered through service registries, search engines, service portals, peer-to-peer networks, among others. To discover pertinent Web services, clients have to devote excessive amount of time to browse through accessible service resources and be able to differentiate between services that share similar characteristics. Discovering Web services throughout heterogeneous environments is becoming a challenging task and raises several concerns such as performance, reliability, and robustness. In this paper, we introduce the Web service broker (WSB) framework that provides a universal access point for discovering Web services. WSB uses a crawler to collect the plurality of Web services disseminated throughout the Web, continuously monitor the behaviour of Web services in delivering the expected functionality, and enable clients to articulate service queries tailored to their needs. WSB can seamlessly be integrated into the existing service-oriented architecture without any alterations to existing environments.