Automating Reusable Workflow Development from Design to Instantiation

The proliferation of web services in both number and variety implies the co-existence of a wide number of service options, input/output data types, and encapsulations. Consequently, composing services into usable workflows has become increasingly development intensive. In order to leverage the design of a workflow and facilitate its reusability and maintenance, many research efforts have advocated to compose services at the type level instead of the instance level while using customized glue code to map service types to service instances. Another challenge then appears: Service types, either manually defined by domain experts or automatically generated from an ontology, cannot be automatically instantiated into concrete services due to the coarse granularity of service types and the complexity of input/output parameter mapping. This paper proposes a platform to automatically extract instantiable abstract operations from registered services and that enables the automatic generation of glue code that links concrete services to service types in order to produce reusable executable workflows.