A Methodology for the Integration of Service Repositories

In the service development lifecycle it is worthwhile to distinguish between a conceptual phase, whose goal is the modeling of abstract services, and an implementation phase, that produces concrete services. Both abstract and concrete services are usually specified through functional and non-functional properties and other meta-information in registries called repositories of services. However, several repositories of services may coexist in a single provider organization, each potentially characterized by heterogeneities and conflicting representations, as actually happens in database design for conceptual schemas. In this paper, we present (i) a model for service description in service repositories and (ii) a methodology for the integration of service repositories guided by the discovery of correspondences between services in different repositories to be integrated. Several paradigmatic examples are provided to show the characteristics of our methodology