Searching for Service-Oriented Strategies of Dynamic Composition of Web Services: A Comparative Perspective

Determining the service composition strategy suitable for service-oriented applications is an essential design issue. As a first step towards understanding service composition, in this paper, we present a comparison study with two different service composition strategies. One is driven by industrial application - BPEL, the other is inspired by the booming research development in semantic web - OWL-S. We compare the two major strategies with each other through the collaborative virtual enterprise (CVE) scenario. Five key dimensions for service composition requirement have been identified These dimensions belong to two types. One type of dimensions is essential requirement including component model, orchestration model and data flow model. The other type is desirable requirement including error handler and transaction, and quality of service. We provide the comparison between BPEL and OWL-S against the five dimensions. Our comparison shows that OWL-S is more suitable for dynamic environments and BPEL is an ideal choice for controlled workflow.