Semantic Web Service Selection at the Process-Level: The eBay/Amazon/PayPal Case Study

Several approaches have been proposed to tackle the selection of distributed processes described as semantic Web services. However, their practical applicability in real composition scenarios is still an open question. Addressing this problem requires on the one hand to deal with services described as stateful business processes and, on the other hand, to consider complex selection requirements concerning both the service interface and its behavior. In fact, in most existing approaches the selection is performed on the basis of the ldquofunctionalrdquo description of a service, i.e. in terms of its inputs, outputs, preconditions and effects. In this paper, we present our approach for the process-level service selection and evaluate it on a real world scenario that entails a high level of complexity: the eBay Web Services,the Amazon E-Commerce Services and the e-payment service offered by PayPal. The approach is based on a representation of services at the process level that is based on BPEL and WSDL specifications and that extends these standard specifications with minimal semantic annotations that permit to perform an efficient and yet useful, semantic reasoning for the process-level selection of Web services.