Data-Grey-BoxWeb Services in Data-Centric Environments

In data-centric environments, for example, in the field of scientific computing, the transmission of large amount of structured data to Web services is required. In service-oriented environments (SOA), the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is commonly used as the main transport protocol. However, the resulting ´by value´ data transmission approach is not efficiently applicable in data-centric environments. One challenging bottleneck of SOAP arises from the XML serialization and deserialization when processing large SOAP messages. In this paper, we present an extended Web service framework which explicitly considers the data aspects of functional Web services. Aside from the possibility to integrate specialized data transfer methods in SOA, this framework allows the efficient and scalable data handling and processing within Web services. In this case, we combine the advantages of the functional perspective (SOA) and the data perspective to efficiently support data-centric environments.