Contracts are a well-established approach for describing and analyzing
behavioral aspects of web service compositions. The theory of contracts comes
equipped with a notion of compatibility between clients and servers that
ensures that every possible interaction between compatible clients and servers
will complete successfully. It is generally agreed that real applications often
require the ability of exposing just partial descriptions of their behaviors,
which are usually known as abstract processes. We propose a formal
characterization of abstraction as an extension of the usual symbolic
bisimulation and we recover the notion of abstraction in the context of
contracts.Comment: In Proceedings FIT 2010, arXiv:1101.426
