Detection of missing Web services: the partial deduction approach

Abstract

Many methods have been recently proposed for composing automatically Web services from existing ones. The methods range from AI planning to automated theorem proving and graph search algorithms. However, the usability of these methods is greatly affected by two assumptions. Firstly, it is assumed that developers provide consistent declarative descriptions of Web services. Secondly, it is assumed that there exists a sufficient set of atomic Web services, which would facilitate the composition of all other Web services. In this paper we propose a method to ensure these two assumptions by using analysis of Web services' descriptions. In particular, we apply partial deduction for identifying possible inconsistencies in Web service descriptions. Our method also determines possibly missing atomic Web services, which should be implemented in order to compose a requested composite Web service.