SEMF - Service Evolution Management Framework

With the growing popularity of Web services, an increasing number of Web services have been integrated into and used by complex service oriented systems. As a result, the management of Web services has gained more importance as Web services management systems can provide useful service information to service consumers, developers and providers. However, current Web service management systems do not provide a holistic view of Web services. These management systems use independent information models covering different aspects of Web services, for instance, QoS, licensing, taxonomy information, to name just a few. In this paper, we address the challenges of (1) integrating available information into a common Web service information model, while (2) providing an extensible information model, and at the same time, (3) keeping track of Web services changes and (4) offering means for complex analysis of Web services. We introduce a Service Evolution Management Framework (SEMF) that addresses the aforementioned challenges using a generic Web service information model. We illustrate how we utilize our proposed Web service information model to manage changes of Web services, and present a case study that shows how our framework could be used in practice.