A model-driven approach for reusing service compositions

The web service approach provides mechanisms for simplifying application integration. However, to meaningfully facilitate scalable development and maintenance of web service applications it is necessary to pay attention to the reuse of not only atomic web services but also existing compositions. In an effort to increase the level of service reusability, we present a model-driven approach providing a more flexible, structured service model to facilitate reuse of existing compositions to create new complex compositions. The goal of this approach is two-fold: provide a simple but expressive service model represented jointly in terms of reusable services, building blocks for constructing and reusing new compositions, and abstract patterns, for managing reusable service composition; and provide a model-driven approach for transforming such reusable building blocks into executable processes. The paper focuses on both how the abstract pattern set is derived and how the model-driven approach facilitates the creation of executable process.