A Pragmatic Approach for Matching UI Components on Web Service Operations

The service-oriented approach with his essential advantages of a uniform interface and the possibility to reuse distributed and heterogeneous services in other contexts has led to a high popularity in Business-to-Business (B2B) scenarios. However, the development of user interfaces (UI) lacks of comparable efforts for the Business-to-Consumer (B2C) interaction because B2C is not properly reflected in current service technology standards. We address this issue with a pragmatic matching approach to support the discovery of UI components and the provision of suggestions that can be exploited for the development of user interfaces for service-based applications. The matching relies entirely on functional descriptions because semantic descriptions play a minor role in practice and almost all available Web services are described by their functional interface focusing on operations, parameters and data types.