Abstract State Services

Abstract State Services (ASSs) have been introduced recently as an abstraction of web services that exploit the fundamental approach of Abstract State Machines. An ASS combines a hidden database layer with an operation-equipped view layer, and can be a simple function, a data warehouse or a full-fledged Web Information System (WIS). In this paper we provide a language for ASSs, and show how ASSs capture all these instantiations of "services".