Service-oriented computing

Abstract

Workflow management and service composition technologies have been around for over twenty years now (or more, depending on who you ask and how you define them). The objective of these technologies is to automate process execution across people and systems. These technologies generated an incredible hype both in the academia and in the industry, at least in the software development industry. Hundreds of process and service composition models have been defined, thousands of papers have been written on the topic, and dozens of commercial workflow/service composition systems have been developed. With all this large effort, one would imagine that such technology is in widespread use and that, if not, the key problems have been identified and that is what generates so much effort from the research community. I believe that this is not the case.