Abstract

Traditionally, integration of applications, as well as integration of businesses, is achieved using costly customized solutions for every pair of applications and every pair of businesses. This requires a business to invest in custom hardware and software infrastructure for each new business partner, not to mention the effort required on a human level to agree upon data formats and interaction protocols, as well as Service Level Agreements (SLAs). For these reasons, the degree of re-usability of current integration solutions is remarkably low [3]. In this context, the Web provides an existing and highly available infrastructure for connecting business partners anywhere and anytime. In addition, Web services [2] provide a set of standards for the provision of functionality over the Web; the specification of the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) as a standard for transmitting messages and of the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) as a standard for describing interfaces provide platform-independent access to back-end functionality. Together, the Web infrastructure and Web Service descriptions have the potential of reducing the cost of integrating applications and integrating business partners, because no custom communication lines need to be built, no proprietary messaging protocols need to be implemented, and no proprietary descriptions of how to communicate with applications and business partners need to be implemented and interpreted. However, Web Service descriptions in WSDL are purely syntactic. The consumer of a service has to rely on a human-language description of the Web service to decide whether the Web service offers the desired functionality. Furthermore, there is no way to cooperate if both business partners have different ∗ c○ACM. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Communications

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