Reconciliation of Contractual Concerns of Web ServicesHandbook of Research on Service-Oriented Systems and Non-Functional Properties

There exist many works addressing service contracts fully or partially. They often mention the same notion with different languages and terminologies. This causes several problems in the specification, negotiation, and monitoring of contractual concerns in service-oriented environments, in particular in the Internet-scale and cloud computing environments. With the objective of reconciling contractual concerns, in this chapter, we will analyze the strengths and weaknesses of existing languages and standards for describing service contracts. We will present our research efforts for dealing with multiple contract specifications and semantics mismatching when identifying, specifying, negotiating, and establishing service contracts for service composition in the Internet and cloud computing environments. We will explore the issues of service contracts compatibility and present our solutions. Furthermore, we will analyze crucial points in monitoring and enforcement emerging contractual terms for Internet-based and cloud-based services that so far have not been in the research focus. © 2012, IGI Global.