WSMX Process Mediation

The amount of resources currently available on-line provides the requestor of a service with practically an unlimited number of options, an unlimited number of services which are able to satisfy its request. Unfortunately this number is drastically reduced by the heterogeneity of the resources, since a client can not benefit from invoking a service with whom it does not know how to communicate. This inability may have two causes: data heterogeneity or public process heterogeneity. The data heterogeneity problem, and how it can be overcame has been the focus of intense research activity during the last years. Many technologies have been developed to tackle this problem, unfortunately all of them require human user inputs at one stage or another in the mediation process. The second problem, which still remains unsolved, is refereing to the public process heterogeneity, which express the behavior of a certain participant in a conversation during the interaction with the other partner. This paper proposes a solution for coping with this problem, illustrating the functionality of a Process Mediator (PM) developed as part of the Web Service Execution Environment (WSMX) [1] and its mediation algorithm.