A Net-based Approach to Web Services Publication and Replaceability

Issue title: Petri Nets 2008

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Bonchi, Filippo | Brogi, Antonio | Corfini, Sara | Gadducci, Fabio

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa, Italy. E-mail: {fibonchi,brogi,corfini,gadducci}@di.unipi.it

Abstract: Web services represent a promising technology for the development of distributed heterogeneous software systems. In this setting, a major issue is to establish whether two services can be used interchangeably in any context. To this aim, our paper first briefly reviews the results contained in a recent article by the same authors, where a suitable notion of behavioural equivalence for Web services was introduced. Our work then extends those results, in order to account for ontologybased service specifications. Next, a concrete example scenario – a car rental system – is presented, and it is then used to illustrate how the equivalence between services can be fruitfully employed for correctly addressing two prominent, modularity-related problems: the publication of correct service specifications and the replaceability of (sub)services.

DOI: 10.3233/FI-2009-133

Journal: Fundamenta Informaticae, vol. 94, no. 3-4, pp. 305-330, 2009