Web services design in context of domain specific e-business

Publication Type:
Thesis
Issue Date:
2005
Filename Description Size
01Front.pdfcontents and abstract660.2 kB
Adobe PDF
02Whole.pdfthesis21.81 MB
Adobe PDF
Full metadata record
NO FULL TEXT AVAILABLE. Access is restricted indefinitely. ----- The emergence of Web services creates an opportunity to address e-business interoperability issues using the service-oriented computing approach. Web services applications need to interact using consistent and well-designed interfaces to ensure semantic interoperability across a business domain. The key determinant for the success of service-oriented e-business is the design of service interfaces. In this thesis we focus on the problem of developing a design framework for reusable and maintainable domain-specific Web services. We propose a design methodology for transforming an existing document-centric e-business standard to a corresponding set of Web services interfaces. The methodology is based on software engineering principles of orthogonality, completeness, and minimality of interface design, and considerations of coupling and cohesion between service interfaces. Our approach is to decompose complex business processes and identify elementary business functions that we then map to Web services. We use UML sequence diagrams to perform this decomposition and transform the resulting business functions into corresponding Web services. The important design goal of our methodology is to maximize cohesion and minimize coupling of the services. Web services interfaces are defined using data elements extracted from business document standards based a widely accepted domain-specific vocabulary for the travel industry, the OpenTravel Alliance specification. The design of service interfaces ensures the data exposure is minimized, making the application more amiable to change. We illustrate the design methodology using travel industry example based on the OpenTravel Alliance specification. The feasibility of the design approach is verified using Flight Booking prototype application that implements Web services based on the interface design. In conclusion we discuss the benefits and drawbacks of the fine granularity Web services that result from the application of the proposed design methodology as compared to the document-centric approach used extensively in e-business today. We conclude that our approach while resulting in more extensive network interactions with associated performance drawbacks, provides more opportunity for reuse and facilitates easier maintenance of Web services applications.
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: