P1242

Web Services Orchestration
closed

The vision of web services assumes a loosely-coupled environment, where services compete and collaborate with each other over the internet. There is a need, therefore, for web services-specific orchestration specifications to support this vision. Currently, there are a number of proprietary orchestration specifications that are not interoperable. There is a danger that the industry does not standardise on one or more interoperable specifications and that businesses will find it increasingly difficult to operate business-to-business processes with each other. This question affects any business that is seeking to deploy web services as part of a business-to-business solution. Thus a collaborative study addressing this issue meets a common need and is timely enough to influence the emergence of the specifications.

What are the main objectives of this Project?

• To describe what orchestration is, what it is for, when it is needed, and how it is related to existing Web services standards e.g. SOAP, WSDL and UDDI.
• Identify and analyse the current and planned orchestration specifications and the relationship between them.
• Assess the merits of each specification to support complex business orchestrations.
• Assess the emerging standards and the degree to which the proprietary specifications will diverge or converge to the standards.
• Analyse the impacts of orchestration on the Telco's businesses and opportunities.
• Assess how interoperability can be achieved between businesses adopting different orchestration specifications, including potential modifications to specifications to improve interoperability.

What relationship exists to other organisations or bodies?

The project work will be based on existing specifications on orchestration from   respective fora and bodies (e.g. W3C) and will feed results back to these fora.