Fabio Patrizi ("La Sapienza" University of Rome)

Automatic Composition of Services

Informally speaking, services are modular, auto-consistent, highly-decoupled,
software blocks designed to provide particular functionalities. Service
descriptions are usually high-level  (e.g., WSDL, BPEL) and provide a
specification of services' interface and relevant aspects of their internal
behavior.

Independently of the particular application scenario they are designed for (e.g.,
Web services, interacting autonomous agents),  high-level description opens the
possibility to automatically "compose services", that is to combine  such blocks in
order to produce a new, desired, target service which satisfies a given high-level
specification. As one might expect, hardness of such problem significantly depends
on the presence or absence of explicit data manipulation abilities.

In this seminar, two frameworks, based on the so-called "Roman" Model, for
automatic service composition will be presented -which can deal with non-data-aware
and data-aware services-, along with some achieved results and future research
directions.