Components and data-flow applied to the integration of Web services

Abstract

The World Wide Web is moving from providing mainly hypertext content to users to new kinds of automated services. Standards lead this change and create a common ground for content representation, exchange and manipulation. New services can be built by integrating existing ones. The paper presents an integration architecture and a tool based on components and data-flow paradigms. The discussion highlights integration problems in information representation, service access, semantic compatibility, and non-functional properties. A case study presents the integration of timetables from three airline Web-services.