Development of a language and its enacting engine for the unified discovery of heterogeneous services

TL;DR

This paper introduces a flexible framework with a query language and discovery engine for unified discovery of heterogeneous services like web, peer-to-peer, and grid services, addressing the challenge of service heterogeneity.

Contribution

It presents a novel, general, and flexible framework supporting unified discovery of diverse service types, with a dedicated query language and discovery engine.

Findings

Framework demonstrates high effectiveness in heterogeneous service discovery

Experimental results show good performance and scalability

Supports extension and adaptation to various service technologies

Abstract

Service orientation fosters a high-level model for distributed applications development, which is based on the discovery, composition and reuse of existing software services. However, the heterogeneity among current service-oriented technologies renders the important task of service discovery tedious and ineffective. This dissertation proposes a new approach to address this challenge. Specifically, it contributes a framework supporting the unified discovery of heterogeneous services, with a focus on web, peer-to-peer, and grid services. The framework comprises a service query language and its enacting service discovery engine. Overall, the proposed solution is characterized by generality and flexibility, which are ensured by appropriate abstractions, extension points, and their sup- porting mechanisms. The viability, performance, and effectiveness of the proposed framework are demonstrated by experimental measurements.