Web Service Middleware - An Infrastructure For Near Future Real Life Web Service Ecosystems

Free trade and the use of Web services from all over the world and across organizational borders have been an omnipresent vision since the idea of Web services arose in the late nineties. Both WS-* specifications and implementations have matured over the years. However, until now we do not perceive large-scale Web service ecosystems, in which Web services are advertised, bargained, invoked and finally charged and paid for. We believe that introducing a middleware as supporting infrastructure for Web service ecosystems promises to pave the way towards providing a wealth of available Web services to service consumers while allowing service providers to generate revenues from service delivery.