A Web Engineering Approach to Model the Architecture of Inter- Organizational Applications

During recent years, the World Wide Web (WWW, Web) has in- creasingly been used as a platform for applications that link together processes both between and across organizations. Acting as distributed components, Web Services provide a standardized way of externalizing functionality on a global scale and as such enable accesses that transcend organizational boundaries to form federated applications. The design and evolution of these federated appli- cations is now imposing new obligations for the disciplined engineering of composed Web solutions. To meet these obligations, we extend the WebCom- position idea, which is an approach to apply component-based software devel- opment concepts on Web applications. This extension facilitates modeling the complex landscape of the components and services building the federated ap- plications. In this context, we introduce the WebComposition Architecture Model that serves as a map to keep track of the interrelations between the fed- erated partners in terms of the involved Web-technology. Among the modeled artifacts are Web services, Web Applications and organizational zones of con- trol that are all subject to evolution in the sense of the WebComposition ap- proach. The rise of network technologies has enabled many fields of applications and ways to support businesses. Initially applied to connect only distributed components within single companies, it is nowadays increasingly used to link together systems of multi- ple enterprises for the purpose of cooperation and federation. The resulting applica- tions are therefore characterized by their component-oriented architecture and distrib- uted nature. This trend has also been influenced by recent advances in Web technologies, par- ticularly in the field of Web services. In the context of enterprise integration, the ser- vice can take the role of the component in a distributed system by exposing function- ality and data through defined interfaces and standardized Web protocols. The value they provide can then be used in applications from within as well as from outside the company. In order to facilitate their orchestration to higher-level services, solutions can rely on business-process engines that control the execution flow of multiple ser- vices based on formal descriptions of the process.