Net Traveler: a framework for autonomic Web services collaboration, orchestration and choreography in e-government information systems

Next-generation government information systems will integrate large amounts of heterogeneous data sources located on distributed networks like the Internet. We present Net Traveler which is a framework for Web services collaboration, orchestration and choreography in peer-to-peer autonomic environments. The main feature of our new approach is the elimination of a central coordination site running the queries and the autonomic query execution. Moreover, control information is embedded with the request for data, and also with the partial results in an XML document. This XML document indicates the next service to be requested, the target site (if known) and how should it process any partial results. We present the architecture, the ideas behind it, a prototype, and a performance study to validate this framework. This study shows this framework to be flexible, scalable and efficient for the Web services collaboration in electronic government applications.