Enabling Flexible Interaction with Web Services

The exploitation of Web Services in e-commerce is affected by their limited support for the interaction with the service consumers. The current standards for the publication of services fail to specify the conversation flow for the invocation of the operations; thus, only simple requests can be performed by the consumers. In this chapter, we present a conversation model supporting the management of long-lasting interactions between service provider and consumer, where several messages have to be exchanged before the service is completed. Other approaches assume that both the service producer and the consumer locally manage the contextual information to carry out the conversation with the partner. In contrast, our model supports the consumers during the service invocation in order to simplify the establishment of short-term business relationships. Our approach is based on an interaction model derived by simplifying Speech-Act Theory. Moreover, the management of the conversation turns is based on the communication techniques proposed by the emerging standards for Web Services.