Variation Oriented Service Composition and Adaptation (VOSCA): A Work in Progress

Traditional research in service composition has assumed perfect functional matching of service capabilities against stated requirements. In real life, however, this is a myth, as borne out within several SOA development and deployment organizations such as IBM in customer engagements. In particular, the variations in data, functional and nonfunctional requirements present a serious hurdle in reusing existing available services and creating service compositions at run-time. Current research in semantic Web services seeks to address this problem by creating meta-models that capture the domain and later on grounding the requirements and capabilities to this meta-model. Our research project, Variation-Oriented Service Composition and Adaptation (VOSCA), investigates the key research issues at modeling-time and run-time described above. Before the VOSCA vision is realized, however, some basic notions need to be first defined and clearly articulated. Hence this paper provides an initial first step by focusing on defining service variants and providing algorithms for service matching.