Towards Adaptation of Service Interface Semantics

Interoperability promised by Web service makes it a most promising technology for the development of next generation distributed heterogeneous software systems. Services should be compliant at signature, behavioral and semantic level to make the interoperation successful and correct. Service adaptation provides an effective approach to bridge the incompatibility of services to make them interoperate as well as possible. In this paper, we aim to contribute to the definition of a methodology to develop adaptors that are capable of making two incompatible services interoperate not only successfully but also correctly at semantic level. To achieve this goal, we proposed service specifications for both atomic and composite services with semantic dependency between outputs and inputs specified; then we proposed adaptor specification consisting of three parts, which are message mapping, action mapping and treatment for non-mapping messages. Based on service and adaptor specifications, an incremental derivation approach of a concrete adaptor is given.