Exposing Semantic Web Service principles in SOA to solve EAI scenarios

Abstract

Traditional Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) focuses on the integration of application interfaces by pipelining different middle- ware technologies like message queuing or remote method invocations. Web Service enabled Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) used in EAI were a step towards providing an abstraction layer for the involved interfaces by using the Web Service Description Language (WSDL) [9]. We enlarge the notion of SOA by applying Semantic Web Services (SWS) technology to it. The architecture employs principles developed in work already published on SWS architectures [18, 40] to demonstrate their applicability in EAI. We examine what current SWS technology offers in respect to the requirements imposed by EAI scenarios. The major focus of the paper is to point out the potentials current SWS technology offer for EAI. This analysis includes some challenges for SWS frameworks to fully enable dynamic discovery and invocation in EAI. It further concludes that both are already possible in intra-EAI scenarios under certain assumptions. We demonstrate the applicability of the Web Service Execution Engine (WSMX), as first kind of a Semantic Service Oriented Architecture (SSOA) in a high-level use-case to exemplify the activities within the lifecycle of such an architecture.