[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Web Services and Quality
My first question is OK you could invoke dynamically web services, but how would you find about it? a UDDI directory? OK but does it tell you what is the web service in a way the computer could understant? About quality, I've seen something with Jini (and of course for Jini). If you're interested, I can find back the link and send it on the list nicolas -----Message d'origine----- De : Chiusano Joseph [mailto:chiusano_joseph@b...] Envoye : mercredi 17 septembre 2003 17:04 A : xml-dev@l... Objet : Web Services and Quality Lately I've been thinking about what's around the corner for Web services (whether we're close to that corner yet or not is a separate issue). The notion of dynamic discovery and collaboration of Web services comes to mind (choreography, business processes, etc.) - but I'm also thinking in terms of how a Web service can judge the "quality" of another Web service. My question is: is anyone aware of any current efforts on rating Web services? To put this question in context, please consider the following scenario: - A travel agency needs to access hotel reservation Web services when making reservations. Rather than have a fixed list of Web services that it always accesses, the travel agency would like to instead dynamically discover Web services at each transaction. This allows the travel agency to avoid having a pre-negotiated agreement with each Web service. - This dynamic approach allows the travel agency to be able to dynamically include newly available Web services (i.e. those not available on a previous transaction), and exclude existing Web services that may no longer be available. - It is assumed that dynamic discovery is through means described by the various Semantic Web-related initiatives taking place (i.e. a Web service can discover another Web service that - for instance - accepts a given credit card, offers fligts by a given airline, etc.). - Since there is no pre-negotiated agreement in this scenario, the travel agent needs a way of determining whether a given Web service is "legitimate" or not. This goes beyond the security/trust realm that can be covered by security tokens, to encompass whether or not the business behind the Web service is legitimate, and not a front for a phony operation. This could be done through the use of a third-party Web Service "certification" authority that is "trusted" by the travel agent. Once the travel agent's Web service agent sees this certification on a Web service, it moves farther with that Web service in its discovery efforts. - Additionally, the Web services (those that the travel agent's Web service attempts to discover) could have some sort of "quality rating" that reflects various factors such as reliability (i.e. whether or not the Web service offers a reliable messaging feature), up time, etc. (others?). - Assuming that the travel agent's Web service has initiatlly "selected" a Web service based on its legitimacy and quality rating: the travel agent's Web service may have a list of criteria specific to its request (hotel reservation) that are required of the discovered Web service, and at various levels (weights). These may reflect the travel agency's business policies. For instance, the travel agency may (for whatever reason) require a 3-day (more lenient) cancellation policy (instead of 1-day notice). Therefore, the requesting Web service may require that any discovered Web service provide information on its cancellation policy - and it subsequently "rates" that policy. - The requesting Web service calculates an overall "weighted score" for each discovered Web service, and returns to the travel agency information from the Web services with the top X scores (X is determined by the travel agency's policies). The aggregated results are then organized according to the travel agency's policies (e.g. sorted by price in ascending order). Kind Regards, Joe Chiusano Booz | Allen | Hamilton
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