Web Service Interactions: Analysis and Design

A fundamental promise of the web services paradigm lies in the ease of sharing information and resources that are provided in the form of web processes. A common approach to support such sharing is to allow web processes to interact through an asynchronous messaging mechanism. This approach lies in the core of many web services standards (SOAP, WSDL, BPEL, WS-CDL, WSCL ...). In this talk, we examine web service interaction models and formalizing some of them into the concept of a "conversation" that captures ordering constraints on messages during web service interactions. We will discuss a few technical results based on the conversation model. For example, the use of FIFO queues for incoming messages has a significant impact on conversations, and therefore is an important design decision. We also present technical results concerning static analysis and automated design of web services in the conversation model. Jianwen Su is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Fudan University, and the Ph.D. degree from University of Southern California, and held visiting positions at Bell Labs and INRIA. He has published over 80 journal and conference papers concerning data models and query languages, scientific and spatial databases, workflow, formal verification, and most recently web services. His current work on web services focuses on modeling and analysis of web service behaviors and compositions. He has served or is serving on program committees of many conferences including PODS, VLDB, SSTD, SSDBM, ICSOC, etc. and was the general chair of the ACM SIGMOD 2001 conference, is a program co-chair of 2005 IEEE Conference on Web Services (ICWS).