W3C is pleased to receive the WSCI Submission from BEA Systems, BPMI.org, Commerce One, Fujitsu Limited, Intalio, IONA, Oracle Corporation, SAP AG, SeeBeyond Technology Corporation and Sun Microsystems.
The Web Service Choreography Interface Language aims to describe the complete set of interactions between Web Services using an XML-based language.
An interaction, or choreography, between 2 Web Services — if the Web Service Client is also seen as a Web Service — is divided into a set of processes and sub-processes, containing themselves a set of operations executed to complete the process. Processes and operations can happen in sequence or in parallel. WSCI contains mechanims to define (the list is not exhaustive): - the relations and correlation between the operations; - the relations, or the composition, between the processes; - a concept of atomic or open transaction, i.e. if an activity must be seen as a single unit of work or not; - and a way to connect operations if more than 2 Web Services are involved (the global model).
While not based on the WSDL framework and syntax, WSCI is defined as an extension of WSDL 1.1 to describe the relations between the WSDL operations and is introducing an ad-hoc syntax expression to address them. It is important to notice that Using Qualified Names (QNames) as Identifiers in Content is being considered by the Technical Architecture Group (TAG), and their use in WSDL is under discussion in the Web Services Description Working Group (see the minutes of the 12 June 2002 face-to-face meeting). While addressing the interactions and the correlations, WSCI does not associate semantics with them. However, these semantics may be described at a different level such as the discovery level.
WSCI 1.0 relates to the following W3C Activities:
As mentioned in Section 7 "Future Work", WSCI is still a work in progress and therefore should still be seen more at a research stage than a well-known technology. Choreography has a deep grounding in the Web services architecture; this work would therefore benefit a lot from the architecture document developed the Web Services Architecture Working Group.
The WSCI submission will be brought to the attention of the Web Services Architecture Working Group and of the Web Services Description Working Group.
The submission will also be brought to the attention of the Web Ontology Working Group as a potential use case for the Web Ontology language designed.
Feedback on this technology is encouraged on the www-ws mailing list (public archive).
Disclaimer: Placing a Submission on a Working Group/Interest Group agenda does not imply endorsement by either the W3C Team or the participants of the Working Group/Interest Group, nor does it guarantee that the Working Group/Interest Group will agree to take any specific action on a Submission.
Update (HH - 2003-06-18): In January 2003, W3C started the Web Services Choreography Working Group to address the area of Web service choreography. Please refer to the Working Group charter and the Web Services Activity statement for details.