Dynamic Composition of Services: Why, Where and How

We live in a society that is in its nature service-oriented: organizations and individuals get services from others, and provide services to others. This paradigm has been now applied to computer systems with the Service-Oriented Architecture, and it is gaining momentum, mainly motivated by the natural environment provided by the Internet to connect people and businesses. The Service-Oriented Architecture provides an architectural style for the creation, share, composition and execution of networked services. Given the actual dynamic, heterogeneous and distributed nature of computer systems, the composition of services requires mechanisms to support service description, advertisement, discovery, composition, and execution. In this paper we motivate the dynamic composition of networked services, presenting an overview on why this area is gaining importance; discussing where it has its most promising applications; and finally exposing our initial ideas on how dynamic service composition can be realized. To tackle these problems we present a life-cycle for the service composition task, and present our initial framework to support dynamic service composition.