Finite State Automata As Conceptual Model for e-Service

Recently, a plethora of languages for modeling and specifying different facets of e-Services have been proposed, and some of them provide constructs for representing time. Time is needed in many contexts to correctly capture the dynamics of transactions and of composability between e-Services. However, to the best of our knowledge, all the proposed languages for representing e-Service behavior and temporal constraints lack both a clear semantics and an underlying conceptual model. In this paper, we propose a conceptual representation of e-Service behavior, taking time constraints into account, and a new XML-based language, namely WSTL (WEB SERVICE TRANSITION LANGUAGE), that integrates well with standard languages in order to completely specify e-Services. In particular, WSTL allows for specifying an e-Service starting from its conceptual representation, in a straightforward way.