Classification of SOA Contract Specification Languages

There are numerous existing notations and standards in the Web service community. These may be grouped broadly into three competing families, namely; Web services, semantic Web, and electronic business. Although the families are competing, we expect that applications will cut across them and there is a need to map from one to another and to analyze compatibility and other properties. Therefore we survey how they deal with different aspects. We then illustrate with examples, the aspects of contracts captured by one language from each of the three competing families in addition to WSDL, the core standard for Web services description. The result is a classification based on the aspects of computations: functionality, protocol, and for instance performance covered by the languages. The classification is used to identify similarities between semantic models and thus find potential mappings between the families. Furthermore, this gives a handle on analysis techniques that may apply to the aspects in a particular family.