A Mediator-Based Approach for Process Mediation of Web Services

Abstract

  Although several efforts were made to support the standardization of Web Services (such as WSDL, UDDI, SOAP, BPEL, etc.), they are not always perfectly compatible to each other due to the distributed nature. Both data and process heterogeneity required and offered by services’ requesters and providers hamper the usability of Web services, thus service mediation becomes one key working area in SOA. While the former has received considerable attention, process mediation is still open and current approaches provide only partial solutions. In this paper, a mediator-based approach for process mediation of web services is proposed to adjust the partially compatible messages interchange behaviors to suit the requested/expected interface of each party. Based on the identification of message exchanging sequences in service interactions, several basic process mismatch patterns are presented to develop basic mediator patterns, which can be used to modularly construct advanced mediators that can resolve all possible process mismatches.