Towards A Theoretical Foundation for Web Services - The Language-Action Perspective (LAP) Approach

The purpose of this paper is to stimulate a discourse and search for appropriate theoretical foundations for Web services. The complexity of Web services technology demands such a foundation. A theoretical foundation can provide adequate guidance not only to accelerate research related to Web services, but can also promote their acceptance. Based on an extensive review of prior work in SCC and ICWS, we identify theories implicitly used for Web services research, and propose the language-action perspective (LAP) as an important and necessary complement to these. Our proposal follows the observation that there is a close match between the core concerns of Web services and the LAP approach. Our ongoing work is aimed at validating appropriateness of LAP as a theoretical framework for Web services through empirical research.