On verifying Web service flows

The article discusses the need for verifying Web service flows. It then presents issues and an approach using software model-checking techniques to accomplish the verification. As the Web service becomes pervasive, an end-user can use various services scattered in a large open network (the Internet) (M. Aoyama, 2001; S. Nakajima, 2001). The service needs to have well-defined descriptions on how the user accesses to it. WSDL (Web Service Description Language), standardized by W3C, is one such description format meant to be universally used (E. Christensen et al., 2001). WSDL is essentially an XML format for describing interface specification of the service. The specification consists of a set of endpoints, each of which provides information necessary for users to access.