Interactive service composition in SEWSIP

SOC (service-oriented computing) is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing, whose vision is to integrate autonomic Web services as distributed components into a complicated application. Current composed service processes are mostly generated in the syntactic level and in a manual way. The limitation of such a rigid approach is that it does not allow businesses to dynamically change partners and services like in "framework for semantic Web process composition" by K. Sivashanmugam. Some semi-automatic Web service composition frameworks are present based on both semantic matchmaking and process recommendation in terms of semantic description of user requirements and concrete Web services. However, two problems need to be crossed over in these frameworks. How to design the activities in the process with the exact clarity that can be bound to concrete Web service, and how to deal with the problem that the output message type of the preceding service is subtly heterogeneous with the input one of the subsequent service? This paper addresses these two problems and proposes a solution in SEWSIP, a semantic based Web service integration platform. A hierarchical activity mechanism used to control activity clarity and a message transforming mechanism used to eliminate message type heterogeneity, are mainly discussed.