Evaluating Web Service Composition Methods: the Need for Including Multi‑Actor Elements

Abstract

New systems can be designed by composing them out‑of‑existing software components which are accessible as web services and provided by the service providers. Governmental organizations can act as service providers by providing information or functionality like authenticating. The basic premise is that by reusing components, development and maintenance costs can be lowered and flexibility is created. As such, public agencies are looking for support to create new compositions. Several composition approaches can be found in the literature, however none of these evaluations take into account the e‑government specific requirements originating from the involvement of multiple parties having different interests. In this paper we present a composition evaluation approach which extends the existing evaluation approaches by including the multi‑actor dimension. We illustrate this method using an example. Further research is aimed at executing the proposed approach and comparing semantic and multi‑actor‑based compositions methods.