Service Annotations for Improving the Generation of Web Service User Interfaces

The concept of service-oriented architectures allows the creation of interactive service-based applications by combining the functionality offered by different web services. However, the information provided by prevalent functional service descriptions (e.g. WSDL) are not sufficient to extensively support the creation of service-based applications. Especially, the development of user interfaces is still carried out manually, and concepts that aim to automate this process are still in their infancy. Therefore, we postulate the usage of UI-related service annotations to improve the quality, and decrease the effort of UI generation for web servics. In this paper, we present a large range of our service annotations that provide additional information about the visual appearance and the behavior of web services, of their operations and of operation parameters. Furthermore, we discuss effects of the annotations on generated web service UIs, and proof user’s awareness of these effects within a conducted user study.