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Subject: Experiences in discovering Web services (action item from lastcon-call)
Dear SEE members, One of the action items from the last SEE phone-con was for
me to email the list with the experiences I had in searching for a useful set
of Web services on the Web. Although the searching was informal, it became
increasingly obvious that there are very few public WSDL web services that are
not demonstration examples or that are only accessible once you have some kind
of sign-in credentials. Theses credentials were usually only available by
completing an online registration form. A report with empirical data on using
different approaches to service discovery is available at [1] For my investigation, I wanted to see if there was a useful
domain (in the context of a B2B integration paper I was writing with some
others) that had a number of realistic invocable Web services, without the need
for credentials. I tried two approaches: 1. I examined a set of WSDL URIs harvested by Holger Lausen
and Juergen Umbrich from DERI Innsbruck. From the URI of the WSDL, many could
be discounted straight away as test or dummy services. I then broadly categorized
the services and then used a tool called StrikeIron to see if I could invoke
the service and get some kind of response. 2. I used the Google filetype search mechanism to search for
WSDL file types along with keywords that corresponded to my rough categorization
from the first step. Any interesting WSDL I found, I again tried to invoke
using the StrikeIron tool. The conclusion: Well, this was an informal experiment but it seems clear
that there are relatively ‘real’ WSDL Web services that are
publicly available on the Web. I did not look into any UDDI registry. XMethods [2]
provides the biggest browsable list of services. that I came across. The most
popular domain areas for services were (in no particular order) weather, GIS/geographic/
mapping services, genetics, parcel-tracking (usually need a sign-in), currency
conversion and SMS messaging. Going through the process made me question the motivation
for heavy investment in semantic service discovery. I see the benefits mainly
in closed environments, especially in larger organizations where the services
are published inside the firewall and are only available to SOAs inside the
company’s boundary. [1] Daniel Bachlechner, Katharina Siorpaes, Dieter Fensel,
and Ioan Toma. Web Service Discovery - A Reality Check. Technical report,
Digital Enterprise Research Insitute (DERI), January 2006. http://www.deri.at/fileadmin/documents/DERI-TR-2006-01-17.pdf
-------------------------------------------------------- Matthew Moran Digital Enterprise Research Institute Phone: +353 91 49 5017 Fax: +353
91 49 5541 DERI Web: http://www.deri.ie
Homepage: http://sws.deri.ie/members/matt -------------------------------------------------------- |
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