=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-140/paper-1
|storemode=property
|title=Dynamic Business: an Opportunity and Challenge for Dynamic Web Processes
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-140/talk1.pdf
|volume=Vol-140
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/icws/Goodwin05
}}
==Dynamic Business: an Opportunity and Challenge for Dynamic Web Processes==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-140/talk1.pdf
DYNAMIC BUSINESS: AN OPPORTUNITY AND
CHALLENGE FOR DYNAMIC WEB PROCESSES
Richard Goodwin
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY
Abstract: Successful businesses adapt to changing market conditions and continually
improve operations in order to deliver value to their customers, and earn a
profit. Such dynamic businesses require adaptable IT systems that support
dynamic processes. Web Services provides a loosely coupled integration and
coordinate mechanism that allows for dynamic processes, but by itself is
insufficient. By applying semantics and developing techniques for web-
service discovery, composition, monitoring and recovery, our community aims
to enable dynamic web processes. Each of these aspects of dynamic web
process lifecycle management has its own challenges and opportunity for
significant impact. In this talk, I'll outline some of the key challenges and
opportunities and describe some of the work that we at IBM Research are
doing to address the challenges and incrementally take advantage of the
opportunities to deliver value to IBM's customers.
Key words: Dynamic Business, Web-Services, WSDL-S, Web-Service Supply-Chain
1. INTRODUCTION
Services comprise an ever increasing proportion of the world economy,
and businesses are competing to efficiently deliver the services that their
customers want. Unlike many physical products, with long design and
manufacturing lead times, services by their nature tend to be more flexible
and more responsive to changing demands of the marketplace. For
example, an insurance company can begin selling identity-theft insurance,
soon after developing the concept, without the need to ramp up production.
The ability to quickly develop and offer such services gives a business a
Richard Goodwin
competitive advantage. IT consulting companies seek to enable rapid
service delivery by creating the right business processes and IT
infrastructure. IBM’s On Demand Business and HP’s Adaptive Enterprise
are just two examples of such efforts.
The challenge for us in the technical community is how to evolve an IT
infrastructure to meet the business needs and enable rapid deployment of
new services. Web services are part of the answer. They provide a loosely
coupled integration mechanism that is independent of the technology used
for implementation. The web service standards are also progressing to
support technical requirements, like security, privacy, non-repudiation and
transaction integrity. But is this sufficient? I contend that in order to fully
participate in the business process associated with the service life cycle, a
web service needs to provide a rich set of meta-data to satisfy both
functional and non-functional requirements. This is not to say that such
meta-data will allow complete automation, but that such data is needed and it
is best to associate it with the web service in a machine readable form rather
than as text documents.
In the following sections, I outline some of the key challenges and
observations for using semantics to enable dynamic web processes.
2. SERVICE DELIVERY, NOT WEB SERVICE
DELIVERY
It is important, but difficult for IT professionals to remember, that web
services are a communications and coordination mechanism and, in most
cases, not the means for delivering services. Amazon web services 1
provides methods for ordering books, checking the status of orders and
providing payment information, but the content of the books is not delivered
via web services. The flows of goods and money compliment the flow of
information to enable delivery of a service. At the same time, web services
are not sufficient to satisfy all communications and coordination needs. Out
of band channels, such as email and telephone may be required to negotiate
access and resolve problems. The meta-data for a web service needs to
indicate how the service relates to the flow of money and goods and provide
the email addresses and phone numbers needed for out of band
communications.
1
http://www.amazon.com
Dynamic Business: an Opportunity and Challenge for Dynamic Web
Processes
3. PROVIDE INCREMENTAL VALUE
Web services are being adopted because their loosely coupled integration
provides value, even though the implementations and standards don’t yet
provide the full functionality that the WS standards efforts envision. To be
successful, the semantic web-service community needs to provide the same
kind of incremental value. The WSDL-S proposal [1] is one effort to
provide such incremental value. It builds on the current industry
specifications and provides a clean mechanism for providing relevant meta-
data. Similar efforts are needed to enable semantic meta-data for processes
and non-functional aspects of web services which are covered by BPEL4WS
and WS-Policy specifications.
4. BUSINESS PROCESSES FOR WEB SERVICES
The decision to use a service, provided through web services, is a
business decision and not a technical decision. The process of identifying a
service, negotiating access rights and performing due diligence is itself a
business process. This process can be made more efficient if the web service
infrastructure offers the kind of meta-data required by this process. For
example, a service interface should provide a web service for requesting
access the service that the web service interface enables. Such services
would be crucial to speeding up the on-boarding of new suppliers and
customers.
5. THE WEB SERVICE SUPPLY CHAIN
The web service infrastructure functions as an IT supply chain, where the
services provided by one business depend on the services offered by its
suppliers. As in a conventional supply chain, the trading partners need to
signal intent and capabilities on an on-going basis. Just as an auto-assembler
needs to share its production schedule with its suppliers in order enable just
in time delivery, a web service consumer needs to signal anticipated changes
in demand for capacity. Similarly on the supplier side, an auto supplier
would let the assembler know if parts were not available in sufficient
quantities. A web service provider nearing capacity should signal its
customers to enable them to deal with the shortage and reduced demand by
shifting to other sources or delaying requests.
Richard Goodwin
6. WEB SERVICE INSTANCES VERSUS
IMPLELEMTATIONS
Most discussions of a web service life cycle revolve around the
deployment or the use of a service that is deployed as a single (logical)
instance. A web service infrastructure can also support the dynamic
selection and deployment of software components that offer web services
interfaces. The meta-data about the component’s web service interface and
non-functional specifications are used to select the component. It provides a
mechanism for large scale code reuse, even if the same service instances
can’t be reused.
7. RIGHT LEVEL OF DESCRIPTION
Generating, maintaining and processing web-service meta-data entails
costs, which can be justified by the value that the meta-data provides. But
not all meta-data provides sufficient value to justify the associated cost. For
example, it might be desirable to encode a simple or simplified service level
agreement as meta-data while the complete contract or license is only
available in human readable form.
8. REFERENCES
[1] Web Service Semantics - WSDL-S Technical Note; Version 1.0,
April, 2005, Rama Akkiraju, Joel Farrell, John Miller, Meenakshi Nagarajan,
Marc-Thomas Schmidt, Amit Sheth, Kunal Verma.