Web services for human interaction

Abstract

In recent years, with the continuous development of the network, the network society has been built up. To develop a more perfect and more powerful network society, a communication between members of this society is indispensable. The communication between human users is very common. There are already many means of communication between human users, for example, MSN, Mail, Skype, Twitter, etc. Business processes can also communicate with external services. Since the advent of Web Services, this kind of communication becomes platform-independent and flexible. However, how to integrate an automating business process with human users remains to be studied. There are multiple ways how human users communicate electronically, for example via Mail, Skype, ICQ message, and SMS. The main task of this work is to implement such communication channels. To provide a flexible integration between human users and business processes these communication channels will be implemented via Web Services. This work proposes concepts of two communication channels: Mail and Skype. Getting a request, processing a request, sending a message, and receiving a message are basic functions. As a very important component a database has been added to store all information. To prove these concepts, they have been put in practice as part of this work. Two Web Services have been developed in this work: Mail Service and Skype Service. In the very end, a set of test cases illustrates the capabilities of Mail Service and Skype Service.