Non-Local Configuration of Component Interfaces by Constraint Satisfaction

© 2020 Springer-Verlag. The final publication is available at Springer via https://doi.org/10.1007/s10601-020-09309-y.Service-oriented computing is the paradigm that utilises services as fundamental elements for developing applications. Service composition, where data consistency becomes especially important, is still a key challenge for service-oriented computing. We maintain that there is one aspect of Web service communication on the data conformance side that has so far escaped the researchers attention. Aggregation of networked services gives rise to long pipelines, or quasi-pipeline structures, where there is a profitable form of inheritance called flow inheritance. In its presence, interface reconciliation ceases to be a local procedure, and hence it requires distributed constraint satisfaction of a special kind. We propose a constraint language for this, and present a solver which implements it. In addition, our approach provides a binding between the language and C++, whereby the assignment to the variables found by the solver is automatically translated into a transformation of C++ code. This makes the C++ Web service context compliant without any further communication. Besides, it uniquely permits a very high degree of flexibility of a C++ coded Web service without making public any part of its source code.Peer reviewe

Formal Models and Algorithms for XML Data Interoperability

In this paper, we study the data interoperability problem of web services in terms of XML schema compatibility. When Web Service A sends XML messages to Web Service B, A is interoperable with B if B can accept all messages from A. That is, the XML schema R for B to receive XML instances must be compatible with the XML schema S for A to send XML instances, i.e., A is a subschema of B. We propose a formal model called Schema Automaton (SA) to model W3C XML Schema (XSD) and develop several algorithms to perform different XML schema computations. The computations include schema minimization, schema equivalence testing, subschema testing, and subschema extraction. We have conducted experiments on an e-commerce standard XSD called xCBL to demonstrate the practicality of our algorithms. One experiment has refuted the claim that the xCBL 3.5 XSD is backward compatible with the xCBL 3.0 XSD. Another experiment has shown that the xCBL XSDs can be effectively trimmed into small subschemas for specific applications, which has significantly reduced the schema processing time.ⓒ Copyright 2010 KIIS