Contract-based web service composition

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is focused on building loosely coupled distributed systems with minimal shared understanding among system components. The main building blocks in SOA are services. Services are selfdescriptive, self-contained, platform-independent and openly-available components that interact over the network. The main goal of SOA is transparent, flexible and dynamic interaction of services and their clients over multiple interconnected domains. While native capabilities of service-oriented architectures, such as description, discovery, communication and binding, have been well understood and standardized, the issue of service composition has not yet been satisfactorily solved. This dissertation challenges the SOA postulate that service should disclose only basic functional signature, and demonstrates that based on semantic service description, including functional and non-functional properties, a viable solution for service composition can be developed (composable servic