Building information systems by orchestrating open services

Service oriented computing has gained a considerable momentum as a new paradigm for building enterprise information systems. Notable efforts have been made recently from both researchers and industrials to support the construction of service-based applications, nevertheless several issues still need to be tackled including service definition and adaptation, and services orchestration. This work proposes an approach for building and finely orchestrating open and adaptable services. An open service is represented by a workflow that coordinates calls to service provider methods. Thereby component activities and the way they are synchronized are rendered visible. Service adaptability refers to the possibility to modify an open service. Through adaptation operations a service can be customized according to given user (application) requirements. In order to finely orchestrate services, they are associated with entry points. An entry point acts as a gateway for inserting and getting information about the progress of service execution. Defined services and orchestration are verified to ensure a correct behaviour of the resulting application. The paper details our approach for building and orchestrating services, and presents associated architectural choices.