Towards Process Transparency using Service Request Languages

Service-Oriented Computing is the emerging paradigm for building complex loosely-coupled distributed information system in which one sees software components as service providers and consumers. With this vision, one abstracts from implementation details and is mainly interested in the signatures of service operations for retrieval and invocation purposes. Invocation sequences are usually organized following a business process designed for one specific need. We propose to leverage on current state of the art methodologies and to push the abstraction further towards achieving process transparency. By process transparency we mean that service consumers and providers achieve their respective goals ignoring as far as possible the details of the underlying process. For instance, a service consumer may be interested in obtaining an insurance for a given good within a certain amount of time independently of how this is achieved (different processes can bring to the same end result). We propose the following research: design of a formal language for service consumers and providers` goals, identification of execution and monitoring frameworks for process transparency, and finally, experimental evaluation of the proposal. Additionally, we provide a one year research workplan to achieve the goal of the project. As further contribution, we highlight connection points between the current proposal and the institution in which we intend to carry out the research. The successful funding of the project will also build a bridge between the applicant`s institution in Italy and the hosting one, which may very well go beyond the span of the presented project.