Engineering Communities of Web Services

This paper presents an approach that provides the necessary assistance to those who are in charge of engineering communities of Web services. Current practices indicate that Web services providing the same functionality are to be gathered into one community, independently of their origins and the way they carry out this functionality. The provided assistance manifests itself by stating the concepts to use, the architecture to select, the operation to script, and the deployment to track. Two protocols frame the interactions in an environment of communities of Web services namely the Web Services Community Development Protocol and the Contract-Net Protocol. The former manages a community in terms of Web services attraction/registration/withdrawal to/with/from this community. The later satisfies users' needs in terms of Web services selection/contracting/triggering. A prototype illustrating the engineering approach with focus on Web services attraction is presented in this paper as well.