Web Service Composition - Current Solutions and Open Problems

Composition ofWeb services has received much interest to support business-to-business or en-terprise application integration. On the one side, the business world has developed a number of XML-based standards to formalize the speci♀cation of Web services, their ow composition and execution. This approach is primarily syntactical: Web service interfaces are like remote procedure call and the interaction protocols are manually written. On the other side, the Semantic Web community focuses on reasoning about web resources by explicitly declaring their preconditions and e♂ects with terms precisely de♀ned in ontologies. For the composition of Web services, they draw on the goal-oriented inferencing from planning. So far, both approaches have been developed rather independently from each other.We compare these approaches and discuss their solutions to the problems of modeling, composing, executing, and verifying Web services. We discuss what makes the Web service composition so special and derive challenges for the AI planning community.