Managing and Delivering Trustworthy Context-Dependent Services

Abstract

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is emerging as the future of distributed computing and enterprise application development. The two key issues in service-oriented applications should be that every provided service meets the expected trust level set by the service requester, and the provided service satisfies its contract in the context of service provision. In order to enforce these issues, it is necessary to specify in the service its trustworthiness properties, and the relationship between its contracts and the contexts in which it is to be provided. However, current approaches have failed to specify them. The FrSeC architecture proposed in this paper aims to remedy this situation. The architecture supports the specification, publication, discovery, selection, and composition of services, where a service with its functional and nonfunctional aspects is bound to a context-driven contract. A family of Service Provision Specification Languages (SPSL) is introduced to specify the architectural elements. The semantic domain behind SPSL is an abstract architecture description formalism based on set theory and logic. This paper provides an overview of FrSeC framework and gives SPSL descriptions for Service Registry, and Service Requester in FrSeC.