Enabling the Delivery of Customizable Web Services

Due to differences in consumer requirements, a Web service usually has multiple service variants for use in different business contexts. In such situations, delivering customizable services helps increase efficiency not only in service description and publication but also in service consumption. However, existing approaches for providing customizable services enforce the tight coupling between providers and consumers. Nor do they take into account recursive nature of service customization. Consequently, the approaches hamper the widespread use of customizable services in SOA. In this paper, we propose a language, namely Web Service Variability Description Language (WSVL), which formalizes the customization interface between providers and consumers using the XML technology to address these problems. We also describe a reference architecture for service deployment and a service engineering technique which together support the provisioning of WSVL-based customizable services. A proof-of-concept prototype system is introduced to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.