Models and Languages for Describing and Discovering E-services

Dr. Fabio Casati
Dr. Ming-Chien Shan

Hewlett Packard Laboratories
USA

Abstract
E-services are business functions made available via the Internet by service providers, and accessible by clients that could be human users or software applications. The main benefit of the e-services environment is that clients are able to dynamically discover the available e-service that best meets their needs, to examine its properties and capabilities, and to determine if and how to access it. However, in order to deliver e-services to clients, service providers are faced with several challenges. In particular, they need to describe e-services in a way that is accessible and understandable by the clients and to advertise them in web directories, so that they can be discovered by brokers as well as by end-users. In this tutorial we discuss the main requirements for models and languages for service description and discovery, and we present relevant approaches proposed by standardization consortia.

About The Speaker
Fabio Casati is a researcher at HP Labs, Palo Alto. He got his PhD from Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in 1999. His research interests include workflow management, e-services, mobile environments, and business process intelligence. He is author of more than 30 papers in international conferences and journals, and has served as organizer and program committee member in several conferences. He is also a lecturer of "Technologies for e-business" at San Jose State University.

Ming-Chien Shan is a research program manager in the Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, California. He joined IBM DB2 team in 1978 working on query optimization, data definition manager and distributed DBMS. He then joined HP in 1985 and managed various research projects, including object-oriented DBMS, heterogeneous DBMS, workflow and telecom service provisioning. Currently, he is the manager of e-business solutions program. Ming-Chien received his PhD degree in computer science from University of California, Berkeley in 1980. He has published more than 50 technical papers and been granted 15 software patents.

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