Change Management in Semantic Web Services

Change Management in Semantic Web Services Change Management in Semantic Web Services in Legal Domain using FSM & XXM Introduction With the new paradigm of Service Oriented Computing, many enterprises attempt to utilize services as fundamental elements for developing applications/solutions as an additive layer on top of existing components. The Web Service Controller Architecture (WSCA) for service-based, enterprise-scaled business solutions provides exactly this flexibility. The design, exposure and management of services can be accomplished through a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that supports the usage, composition and coordination of services in a loosely coupled manner. Web services appear to be particularly suitable for addressing these aspects of a SOA. Furthermore, composition languages such as BPEL add value by composing Web services and facilitating the implementation of business processes. As the SOA paradigm brings this big behavior change relying on loose coupling of services it raises new questions in the area of change management. Change management is a central aspect in any software design, but its complexity for Web services is increased by both composition languages and loose coupling. The resulting advantages like composability, autonomy, message-based communication, and the avoidance of combined compilation and binding prove to be deficiencies in this context. In this paper we discuss these elementary challenges of change management in the area of Web services (Web Service Change Management, WSCM). Currently there are no sound mechanisms and engineering principles for changing Web services and their related entities. Through analysis of a suitable scenario, specifically looking at the details of the Web service provider and consumer roles, one can identify the various problems that exist in this domain. Therefore we will start our approach with the consideration of an application scenario from the business domain of application and change management, the addition of Web servic es in private legal sector. An Overview of a WSCA A WSCA consists of several autonomous outsourced Web services, but acts as a virtually coherent entity. Business entities, in the form of Web services, are often geographically distributed and organizationally independent. While WSCA has a potential to introduce new business opportunities through dynamic alliances, the challenges of fully realizing a WSCA lie in managing changes during its lifecycle through Extreme X Machines (XXM). XXM: In this paper we explore the design changes as made to software projects by the use  of a formal model known as Extreme X-Machines (XXM) [5,6], which  are based on the work of Eilenberg and Holcombe [7,8]. An XXM model describes the functionality of the software without defining exactly how this functionality is achieved. This perspective allows an analysis of functional change whilst excluding specific implementation or requirements issues. XXM are a state based model, they are intended to be us ed by developers as a method to design  their systems from at the top level but here, XXM are used as effectively to analyze and incorporate changes in, even addition of new web services. Each model typically consists of a set of states which correspond to screens in the final system and functions which link the screens together. The functions are typically labeled with an enabling action such as â€Å"click_ok† which corresponds to a user clicking the OK button.