Web services communities gather Web services providing similar (or equivalent) functionalities, such as flight booking and travel reservation, in a same virtual structure. A community of Web services is a means to provide the description of a desired functionality (e.g., Flight- Booking) without explicitly referring to any concrete Web service (e.g., EKFlightBook-ing) that will implement this functionality at run-time.
Using communities offers many advantages ranging from facilitating the discovery of Web services since they are all in the same place, to enhancing the composition since Web services can be substituted and tasks can be delegated within the same community, to enforcing the security since the master is in charge of checking the credentials of the members before joining and during their stay in the community. With communities of Web services, the discovery process will be easier because it targets populated communities with similar Web services.
The current developments done to bear this notion are around the following questions:
- How to specify and represent communities of Web services in compliance with the existing standards/specifications?
- How to initiate, set up, and dismantle a community of Web services? Who would be in charge of managing a community? And, how to specify and manage Web services in a community?
- What kind of policies should guarantee the consistency of communities of Web services?
- How to make a Web service select the community that suits it better? How to convince a Web service to stay longer in a community? And, how to eject a Web service from a community for misbehavior?
- How to evaluate and establish trust for a community?
Research group on Web Services Communities
The Research group on Web Services Communities was established jointly by the Zayed University (UAE), Concordia University - Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering (Canada), the University of Lyon 1 - LIRIS (France) and the University of Namur - PReCISE Research Center in Information Systems Engineering (Belgium).
The members of the group meet every year in Namur thanks to the financial support of the University of Namur. The wiki server is hosted by the University of Namur.
Main contact: zakaria.Maamar@zu.ac.ae (dr Zakaria Maamar)
