Towards restful web service composition for healthcare domain

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been widely adopted by industries due to its ability to provide increased interoperability among heterogeneous systems. SOA is realized through web services which can be either based on the style of Remote Procedure call(RPC) and SOAP protocol or on the Representational State Transfer(REST) style and HTTP. RESTful web services are increasingly becoming popular in the industry because of their simplicity, uniform interface, statelessness and cacheability benefits. The ability to efficiently select and integrate appropriate heterogeneous services available on the web dynamically at runtime is essential in the development of the applications based on web services. Whenever a single web service cannot satisfy the functionality required by the user, there should be a possibility to combine several existing services together in order to fulfill the request. This need has triggered a considerable number of research efforts on the composition of web services. Although several works have focused on the composition of SOAP based web services, there has not been adequate effort towards the composition of RESTful services. However, due to the above- mentioned advantages offered by the RESTful web services, it will be beneficial to design an application as a composition of such RESTful services. Towards this objective, this paper investigates two different approaches for composing the REStful web services specifically designed for health care domain, one using the Jopera tool and another using hypermedia.