A Method of Enabling Automated Invocation of Web Services

While Web services provide an essential building block for realizing dynamic e-business by facilitating standardsbased program-to-program interaction, they do not address many business aspects of communication such as security, access control, business partner selection, service level agreement monitoring, and logging. In this paper, we propose a service-oriented framework that provides these much needed infrastructure services. Using the framework, service providers can prepare their business applications for publishing as Web services, and specify access controls on their services in the registry while service requestors can find suitable service providers and invoke their services dynamically. The framework ensures that all transactions are secure, monitored for service level agreements and logged for audit purposes. By providing business utility services and automation technology founded on Web services, we believe that, our framework takes Web services to the next level in supporting dynamic e-business.