Towards an UML Profile for Web Service Composition Based on Behavioral Descriptions

Ayoub Sabraoui, Ahmed Ettalbi, Mohammed El Koutbi, Abdeslam En-Nouaary

Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.
Mobile Intelligent Systems Team (MIS), Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Informatique et d’Nalyse des Systèmes (ENSIAS), Rabat, Mo-rocco.

DOI: 10.4236/jsea.2012.59084                

Abstract

Web service composition is one of the challenging issues that have been investigated over the past decade. It consists of combining and reusing existing Web services to best suit new user requirements. This paper proposes an UML profile to compose Web services based on their behavioral aspects. To do so, the web service WSDL files are first transformed to UML models; then the profile is used to integrate them; finally the MDA approach is adopted to transform the applied profile into a BPEL process. As such, our method has the advantages of being independent of the Web service composition language and the UML modeling tool. Finally, a case study is developed in order to show the benefits of our method.

Keywords

Web Service Composition; UML Profile; MDA; BPEL

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

References

[1]	W3C Working Group, “Web Services Architecture,” 2004. http://www.w3.org/TR/ws-arch/
[2]	W3C Working Draft, “Soap Version 1.2 Part0: Primer,” 2001. http://w3.org/TR/2001/WD-soap12-part0-20011217
[3]	W3C Note, “Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1,” 2001. http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl
[4]	UDDI Spec Technical Committee Draft, “UDDI Version 3.0.2,” 2004. http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/uddi-spec/doc/spec/v3/uddi-v3.0.2-20041019.htm
[5]	R. Karunamurthy, “Web Service Composition: Architecture, Frameworks, and Techniques,” Ph.D. Thesis, Concordia University, Montreal, 2009.
[6]	C. Pahl and Y. Zhu, “A Semantical Framework for the Orchestration and Choreography of Web Services,” Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, Vol. 151, No. 2, 2006, pp. 3-18. doi:10.1016/j.entcs.2005.07.033
[7]	Object Management Group, “MDA Guide Version 1.0.1,” 2003.
[8]	OASIS Standard, “Web Services Business Process Execution Language Version 2.0,” 2007. http://docs.oasis-open.org/wsbpel/2.0/OS/wsbpel-v2.0-OS.html
[9]	ATLAS group LINA & INRIA, “ATL: Atlas Transformation Language,” Version 0.2, 2005. http://www.uio.no/studier/emner/matnat/ifi/INF5120/v05/undervisningsmateriale/
[10]	M. Juric, “Business Process Execution Language for Web Services,” Packt Publishing Ltd., Birmingham, 2004.
[11]	Object Management Group, “OMG Unified Modeling Language (OMG UML) Superstructure, Version 2.2,” 2009. http://www.omg.org/spec/UML/2.2/Superstructure/PDF
[12]	A. Jakimi, A. Sabraoui, M. Elkoutbi and A. Idri, “A New Approach for Composing UML Scenarios and Code Generation,” Proceedings of the IEEE 4th International Conference on Sciences of Electronics, Technologies of Information and Telecommunication, Hammamet, Tunisia, 25-29 March 2007.
[13]	“JDOM, Version 2.0.0,” 2012. http://www.jdom.org/
[14]	Object Management Group, “Object Constraint Language, OMG Available Specification, Version 2.0,” 2006. http://www.omg.org/spec/OCL/2.0
[15]	O. Patrascoiu, “YATL: Yet Another Transformation Language,” Proceedings of the 1st European MDA Workshop, MDA-IA, University of Twente, Enschede-Noord, 2004, pp. 83-90.
[16]	O. Patrascoiu, “Model Transformations in YATL. Studies and Experiments,” Technical Report No. 3-04, University of Kent, Kent, 2004.
[17]	T. Mens, P. Van Gorp, D. Varró and G. Karsai, “A Taxonomy of Model Transformation,” Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, Vol. 152, 2006, pp. 143-159. doi:10.1016/j.entcs.2005.10.022
[18]	D. Steinberg, F. Budinsky, M. Paternostro and E. Merks, “EMF: Eclipse Modeling Framework,” 2nd Edition, Addison-Wesley Professional, New York, 2008.
[19]	I. Jacobson, M. Christerson, P. Jonsson and G. Overgaard, “Object-Oriented Software Engineering: A Use Case Driven Approach,” Addison-Wesley, New York, 1992.
[20]	D. Skogan, R. Gronmo and I. Solheim, “Web Service Composition in UML,” 8th IEEE International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference, Monterey, 20-24 September 2004, pp. 47-57.
[21]	B. Bordbar and A. Staikopoulos, “Modelling and Transformation of Behavioural Aspects of Web Services,” 3rd Workshop in Software Model Engineering (WiSME), Inc Conjunction with UML, 2004.
[22]	W. Nam, H. Kil and D. Lee, “On the Computational Complexity of Behavioral Description-Based Web Service Composition,” Theoretical Computer Science, Vol. 412, No. 48, 2011, pp. 6736-6749. doi:10.1016/j.tcs.2011.04.020
[23]	J. M. Ko, C. O. Kim and I. H. Kwon, “Quality-of Service Oriented Web Service Composition Algorithm and Planning Architecture,” The Journal of Systems and Software, Vol. 81, No. 11, 2008, pp. 2079-2090. doi:10.1016/j.jss.2008.04.044
[24]	B. Zibanezhad, K. Zamanifar, R. Sadjady and Y. Rastegari, “Applying Gravitational Search Algorithm in the QoS-Based Web Service Selection Problem,” Journal of Zhejiang University, Vol. 12, No. 9, 2011, pp. 730-742.
[25]	J. Lim and K. Lee, “Constructing Composite Web Services from Natural Language Requests,” Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2010, pp. 1-13. doi:10.1016/j.websem.2009.09.007
[26]	Y. Ni and Y. S. Fan, “Model Transformation and Formal Verification for Semantic Web Services Composition,” Advances in Engineering Software, Vol. 41, No. 6, 2010, pp. 879-885. doi:10.1016/j.advengsoft.2010.01.005
[27]	H.-N. Talantikite, D. Aissani and N. Boudjlida, “Semantic Annotations for Web Services Discovery and Composition,” Computer Standards & Interfaces, Vol. 31, No. 6, 2009, pp. 1108-1117. doi:10.1016/j.csi.2008.09.041
[28]	S.-H. Yeganeh, J. Habibi, H. Rostami and H. Abolhassani, “Semantic dweb Service Composition Testbe,” Computers & Electrical Engineering, Vol. 36, No. 5, 2010, pp. 805-817. doi:10.1016/j.compeleceng.2008.04.007