Web service gateway - a step forward to e-business

Business-to-business will be a considerable market in the near future of Internet e-business. In this future market, several providers need to be able to integrate or exchange information in providing a global service. The problem that we want to tackle in this paper is related to the existing information sources in the current Internet environment. That is how to integrate existing Web sites each other to become a new Internet service. The difficulty comes from a historical objective. Internet Web sites were developed for human users browsing and so, they do not support machine-understandable as well as interprovider interaction. To overcome this gap, we need a framework to systematically migrate the existing presentation-oriented Web sites to service-oriented one. Evidently, redeveloping all of them is an unacceptable solution. In this paper, we propose a mechanism of Web service gateway in which existing Web sites are wrapped by several Web service wrappers. Thus, without any efforts to duplicate the Web sites code, these services inherit all features from the sites while can be enriched with other Web Service features like UDDI publishing, semantic describing, etc. As a consequence, they can be easily integrated to each other in a business-to-business schema to provide a more valuable service for users. This Web service gateway was developed in Toshiba with Web Service Generator, allowing to automatically generate Web service wrappers. By using this system, several "real" Web services were generated and made available for use. The Web service gateway and these services are also presented and evaluated in this paper.

1. Introduction

The success of the Internet does not only allow the connection of computers and business partners world-wide but also open a new way to carry out the business transactions. Supply and commerce over the Internet, such as online weather forecast ([9]) or online book shops ([10] [11]), have already entered to the market as individual information sources. Broadly saying, “Business-to-Customer oriented” and “not-open”, are the two principle characteristics of almost all these information sources. The latter can be considered as a consequence of the former since supporting Business-to-Customer schema does not require one information source to be opened to others. However, Business-to-Business must be a considerable market in the future e-business in which each provider needs to share its capabilities with others. This future market also requires an infrastructure to integrate several providers in a global service, in supporting other service-independent features like accounting, billing, security, etc…. Evidently, Web Service technology is the most promising candidate. The question that we want to tackle in this paper is related to the existing information sources in the current Internet. That is how to harmonize them with the future Business-to-Business market ?