Analyzing the selection and dynamic composition of web services in e-commerce transactions

Over the past few years Web Services (WS) have revolutionized the way loosely coupled distributed systems communicate and interact online. The aforementioned success has led to an abundance of available WS, which makes it harder for users and businesses to discover the appropriate services to be used as standalones or as part of a domain-specific service composition. Semantics and Ontologies may certainly provide invaluable solutions to facilitate the discovery process. In addition, Quality of Service (QoS) characteristics may also be taken into consideration towards optimizing service compositions. In this paper we firstly attempt to stress the importance of properly discovering and selecting WS by reviewing recent research results and secondly to analyze and identify the current discrete dynamic service composition approaches. Our interest is both for QoS-aware service compositions (system level), and for Business-driven automated compositions (business level). We highlight the advantages, the methods and techniques involved and the challenges of each approach. Finally, we analyze their influence on designing and implementing interoperable e-commerce transactions as solutions that exploit dynamic composition scenarios.