Agile Web Service Composition and Messaging approach for e-Government services

Abstract

E-Government services are increasingly being deployed using service-based architectures. Individual web services, developed from legacy and modern firmware, are composed to achieve e-service delivery. Current web service composition approaches range from practical languages aspiring to become standards (like BPEL, WS-CDL, OWL-S and WSMO) to theoretical models (like automata, Petri nets and process algebras). In this work, current approaches were studied and a comparison of their features and weaknesses was carried out. It was observed that current composition mechanisms are static and not agile enough to cater for functional change in business needs. This paper proposes a new web service composition and messaging mechanism for electronic government services in which composition of web services is done dynamically to provide for more agility in government e-services. The proposed composition mechanism works on a software architecture which enables application software integration. This architecture has been developed to deploy end-to-end e-services to G2B, G2C and G2G users starting from legacy government software applications. Using the proposed approach, integrating back-end e-Government applications to deliver end-to-end e-services can be agile, simpler and faster. The main contribution of this paper is the novel dynamic web service composition mechanism.