Automatic Assertion of Actor State in Service Oriented Architectures

Documentation of provenance, the process which was taken to create a particular data item, is critical within service oriented architectures where loose coupling between services and clients (actors) is employed. Such a process may involve interaction between multiple services, with each service being managed by a particular actor. The recording of actor state may provide critical contextual information regarding the state of a particular actor at a point during a client-service interaction, but is however typically left undocumented. We discuss the issues that are encountered with the automatic documentation of actor state and the types of resources which may be used to provide it. An architecture which allows monitoring tools to be related to user needs is presented and evaluated against a number of scenarios in a Web Services environment.