Business Rules Enabled Semantic Service Discovery and Selection for B2B Integration

Abstract

In service-oriented business applications, B2B integration happens when a service requester invokes services of one or more service providers. Typically, there are several candidate services with similar capabilities that can be chosen by a requester in order to serve his business needs. The selection of the service to be invoked may depend on different functional and non-functional properties. The nonfunctional properties usually address security, reliability, performance, and so forth. The functional properties address the business process interplay at the level of the technical Web service interface and the message choreography associated with it. At the technical integration level, the description of functional and non-functional service properties has been exhaustively addressed in the scientific literature in the past. The business level however, namely, the requester’s business need, the business meaning of an offered service, and the capability of a service provider to successfully perform the requested business transaction, has been rather ignored. This chapter describes a solution for service discovery and selection at the business level, that is, at the level of offered business capability of a service provider and the ability to serve a concrete requested business transaction. The proposed solution is based on semantic interpretation of offered service capabilities, contractual restrictions, business rules of the requestor specifying selection preferences, and the parameters of the run-time service request. The applicability of the proposed solution is demonstrated on a shipper-carrier integration scenario.