Web service conversation modeling: A cornerstone for E-business automation

Web services are emerging as a promising technology for effectively automating interorganizational interactions. However, despite the growing interest, several issues remain to be addressed to provide Web services with benefits similar to what traditional middleware brings to intra-organizational application integration. In this article, the authors identify a framework that builds on current standards to help developers define extended service models and richer Web service abstractions. The framework's main feature is a conversation metamodel derived from the authors' analysis of e-commerce portal sites.