Model-based development of Web service descriptions enabling a precise matching concept

Web services are software components that can be discovered and employed at runtime using the Internet. Conflicting requirements towards the nature of these services can be identified. From a business perspective, Web services promise to enable the formation of ad-hoc cooperations on a global scale. From a technical perspective, a high degree of standardization and rigorous specifications are required to enable the automated integration of Web services. A suitable technology for Web services has to mediate these needs for flexibility and stability. To be usable in practice, this technology has to be aligned to standard software engineering practice to allow for a seamless development of Web service enabled components. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to the description of Web services. It is a visual approach based on the use of software models and graph transformations and allows for the flexible description of innovative services while providing a precise matching concept. A methodology enabling the seamless development of such Web service descriptions in the context of a standard model-based development approach is presented.