Behavioural Description Formalisms for Service Integration - Survey and Comparation

Current web infrastructure is oriented on human-machine interactions. Developments for next generation large-scale information systems (such as Web Services and ebXML) however aim to allow for automated interactions between arbitrary systems / services. This is achieved by supplying high level descriptions of service capabilities and enabling information systems to dynamically discover and access each other. Fundamental to progress towards this vision is the understanding of the behavioural descriptions that services might publish/access in such new information environments. The properties of such formalisms will have major impact on the practically of building systems able to effectively reason about service integration. This paper reviews 5 well known behavioural description languages (PDDL, DAML-S, WSFL, ebXML and ConGolog) and makes an initial evaluation on the basis of a number of criteria such as completeness, flexibility, composability, expressiveness and complexity.