Integrated Metadata Support for Web Service Runtimes

Abstract

Service metadata is an important aspect when developing applications following the service-oriented architecture paradigm. Such metadata includes a description of functionalities offered by a service, pre- and postconditions and data that is produced and consumed by a service, as well as a categorization of functionalities in the domain. Providing expressive metadata for services as part of the runtime infrastructure is necessary to leverage adaptability and autonomic behavior such as dynamic (re-)binding, service selection, invocation and composition. In this paper we present a model and its implementation for adding a reasonable amount of service metadata to foster their use in service-oriented applications and describe how to map concrete Web services to this metadata model. Furthermore, we explain our model based on an illustrative example from the telecommunications domain.