Web service gateway - a step forward to e-business

Abstract

Business-to-business will be a considerable market in the near future of Internet e-business. In this future market, several providers need to be able to integrate or exchange information in providing a global service. The problem that we want to tackle in this paper is related to the existing information sources in the current Internet environment. That is how to integrate existing Web sites each other to become a new Internet service. The difficulty comes from a historical objective. Internet Web sites were developed for human users browsing and so, they do not support machine-understandable as well as interprovider interaction. To overcome this gap, we need a framework to systematically migrate the existing presentation-oriented Web sites to service-oriented one. Evidently, redeveloping all of them is an unacceptable solution. In this paper, we propose a mechanism of Web service gateway in which existing Web sites are wrapped by several Web service wrappers. Thus, without any efforts to duplicate the Web sites code, these services inherit all features from the sites while can be enriched with other Web Service features like UDDI publishing, semantic describing, etc. As a consequence, they can be easily integrated to each other in a business-to-business schema to provide a more valuable service for users. This Web service gateway was developed in Toshiba with Web Service Generator, allowing to automatically generate Web service wrappers. By using this system, several real Web services were generated and made available for use. The Web service gateway and these services are also presented and evaluated in this paper.