Licentiate thesis 2007-001

Querying Mediated Web Services

Manivasakan Sabesan

5 February 2007

Abstract:

Web services provide a framework for data interchange between applications by incorporating standards such as XMLSchema, WSDL SOAP, HTTP etc. They define operations to be invoked over a network to perform the actions. These operations are described publicly in a WSDL document with the data types of their argument and result. Searching data accessible via web services is essential in many applications. However, web services don't provide any general query language or view capabilities. Current web services applications to access the data must be developed using a regular programming language such Java, or C#.

The thesis provides an approach to simplify querying web services data and proposes efficient processing of database queries to views of wrapped web services. To show the effectiveness of the approach, a prototype, web Service MEDiator system (WSMED), is developed.

WSMED provides general view and query capabilities over data accessible through web services by automatically extracting basic meta-data from WSDL descriptions. Based on imported meta-data, the user can then define views that extract data from the results of calls to web service operations. The views can be queried using SQL. A given view can access many different web service operations in different ways depending on what view attributes are known. The views can be specified in terms of several declarative queries to be applied by the query processor. In addition, the user can provide semantic enrichments of the meta-data with key constraints to enable efficient query execution over the views by automatic query transformations. We evaluated the effectiveness of our approach over multi-level views of existing web services and show that the key constraint enrichments substantially improve query performance.

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