Web Service: Been There, Done That?
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Wright State University CORE Scholar The Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge- Kno.e.sis Publications Enabled Computing (Kno.e.sis) 1-2003 Web Service: Been There, Done That? Steffen Staab Will van der Aalst V. Richard Benjamins Amit P. Sheth Wright State University - Main Campus, [email protected] John A. Miller Wright State University - Main Campus See next page for additional authors Follow this and additional works at: https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/knoesis Part of the Bioinformatics Commons, Communication Technology and New Media Commons, Databases and Information Systems Commons, OS and Networks Commons, and the Science and Technology Studies Commons Repository Citation Staab, S., van der Aalst, W., Benjamins, V. R., Sheth, A. P., Miller, J. A., Bussler, C., Maedche, A., Fensel, D., & Gannon, D. (2003). Web Service: Been There, Done That?. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 18 (1), 72-85. https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/knoesis/189 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the The Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-Enabled Computing (Kno.e.sis) at CORE Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Kno.e.sis Publications by an authorized administrator of CORE Scholar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Authors Steffen Staab, Will van der Aalst, V. Richard Benjamins, Amit P. Sheth, John A. Miller, Chistoph Bussler, Alexander Maedche, Dieter Fensel, and Dennis Gannon This article is available at CORE Scholar: https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/knoesis/189 Trends & Controversies Steffen Staab University of Karlsruhe [email protected] Web Services: Been There, Done That? What are Web services? The Stencil Group defines them as benefits might even seem to waste away, once we touch on “loosely coupled, reusable software components that semanti- the nitty-gritty details, because Web services per se do not cally encapsulate discrete functionality and are distributed and offer a solution to underlying problems such as programmatically accessible over standard Internet protocols” (see www.stencilgroup.com/ideas_scope_200106wsdefined. • How can I effectively and efficiently distribute computa- html). Does this sound familiar? Long ago, people learned how tion efforts? to send software components and RPCs over HTTP (for an expla- • How can I make a software component really reusable? nation of RPC and other terms, see the “Glossary” sidebar). Mes- • How can I control and monitor these processes? sage exchange is increasingly based on XML, but so what? • How can I effortlessly integrate the components? Do you recognize hype when you see it? Let us measure fame as a Google count of Web pages that include a specified term. The following contributions delve into some of these issues. For example, measure the Semantic Web—now the topic of an Wil van der Aalst describes the pitfalls of workflow issues, many established department in IEEE Intelligent Systems—against of which we’ve encountered before. V. Richard Benjamins points Web services. (The Semantic Web department in this issue to the various research in the 1990s into structuring procedural also covers Web services.) The first Semantic Web language knowledge into problem-solving methods. Amit Sheth and John document (a working draft on the Resource Description Frame- A. Miller discuss how a low initial entry barrier and simple tech- work) was issued as part of the World Wide Web Consortium nology are balanced against the long-term goal of easy integra- metadata activity in October 1997 (www.w3.org/2001/sw). Using tion. Christoph Bussler, Alexander Maedche, and Dieter Fensel Google’s exact search, the term “Semantic Web” yields approxi- strongly support this idea—in particular, by including semantics mately 136,000 Web pages. in their Web Service Modeling Framework. Finally, Dennis Gan- Now consider “Web services.” The first UDDI document I non argues that Web services should not follow the well-worn could find dates from 1999, and the first W3C XML Protocol and unsuccessful paths of other distributed-object technology. Activity preceding the Web Services Activity started in Septem- Rather, they should build on new kinds of applications, such as ber 2000 (see www.w3.org/2002/ws).1 The corresponding grid enterprises, which are only possible using technologies such count delivers a whopping 3,210,000 pages. Compare these as Web services. Have we been there before? Let’s see. numbers with “artificial intelligence,” whose count ranks at —Steffen Staab 1,410,000, “Corba” (Common Object Request Broker Architec- ture) at 1,650,000, and “TCP” at 7,640,000. Even given the inevitable fallacies of these numbers, the Reference overall result is clear: Web services have received a lot of hype, 1. A. Preece and S. Decker, “Intelligent Web Services,” IEEE Intelligent the reasons for which are not easily determined. Some of their Systems, vol. 17, no. 1, Jan./Feb. 2002, pp. 15–17. bar.) BPEL4WS allows for a mixture of block- and graph- Don’t Go with the Flow: Web Services structured process models, thus making the language Composition Standards Exposed expressive at the price of being complex. Although Wil van der Aalst, Eindhoven University of BPEL4WS is not such a bad proposal, it is remarkable Technology how much attention this standard has received, while more fundamental issues and problems such as semantics, The recently released BPEL4WS is said to combine the expressiveness, and adequacy have not received the atten- best standards for Web services composition, such as tion they deserve. IBM’s WSFL and Microsoft’s XLANG. (For an explana- Of course, having a standard is a good idea, but there are tion of these and other acronyms, see the “Glossary” side- too many of them—and most die before they mature. Con- 72 1094-7167/03/$17.00 © 2003 IEEE IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS Published by the IEEE Computer Society Glossary sider the growing list of acronyms: PDL, B2B Business to Business XPDL, BPSS, EDOC, BPML, WSDL, BPEL4WS Business Process Execution Language for Web Services WSCI, ebXML, BPEL4WS—and these are BPMI Business Process Management Initiative just some of the acronyms referring to vari- BPML Business Process Modeling Language ous standards in the domain. Another prob- BPSS Business Process Schema Specification lem is that these languages typically don’t Corba Common Object Request Broker Architecture have any clearly defined semantics. The ebXML Electronic Business Using Extensible Markup Language only way to overcome these problems is to EDI Electronic Data Interchange critically evaluate the so-called standards IBROW3 Intelligent Brokering Service for Knowledge-Component Reuse for Web services composition. In other on the World Wide Web words, don’t just go with the flow. IDL Interface definition language OMG Object Management Group Web services composition PSM Problem-solving method Two trends are coming together in e-busi- RPC Remote procedure call ness that are creating both opportunities and SOAP Simple Object Access Protocol pressures to automate business processes UDDI Universal Description Discovery and Integration across organizational boundaries. One is WfMC Workflow Management Coalition the technology push created by enabling WSCI Web Service Choreography Interface technologies taking XML-based standards WSDL Web Services Description Language and the Internet as a starting point. The WSFL Web Services Flow Language other trend is improving the efficiency of WSMF Web Services Modeling Framework processes from a business perspective. XLANG Web services for business process design After the dotcom crash, there was a XPDL XML Process Definition Language pressing need to use Internet technology’s potential by automating business processes across enterprise boundaries. Web services aim to exploit XML technology and the Internet by integrating applications than can Web services composition: be published, located, and invoked over the Business Process Execution Web. A typical example of a Web services Language for Web Services, Publication and discovery: application is the Galileo system, which XLANG, Universal Description Discovery connects more that 42,000 travel agency Web Services Flow Languages and Integration locations to 37 car rental companies, 47,000 hotels, and 350 tour operators. Service description layer: To truly integrate business processes Web Services Description Language across enterprise boundaries, merely sup- porting simple interaction using standard XML messaging layer: messages and protocols is insufficient. Simple Object Access Protocol Business interactions require long-running interactions that are driven by an explicit Transport layer: process model. This raises the need for Web HTTP, SMTP, FTP services composition languages such as BPEL4WS,1 WSFL,2 XLANG,3 WSCI, and BPML. These languages are also known as Figure 1. Overview of Web services technology. Web services flow languages, Web services execution languages, Web services orches- • An envelope that defines a framework saging layer such as SOAP. A WSDL docu- tration languages, and Web-enabled work- for describing what is in a message and ment defines services as collections of net- flow languages. Before discussing such lan- how to process it work endpoints, or ports. WSDL separates guages, I focus on the typical technology on • A set of encoding rules for expressing the abstract definition of endpoints and which they are building. instances of application-defined data messages from their concrete network Figure 1 shows the relation