Modeling and Reasoning about Service-Oriented Applications via Goals and Commitments

Service-oriented applications facilitate the exchange of business services among participants. Existing modeling approaches either apply at a lower of abstraction than required for such applications or fail to accommodate the autonomous and heterogeneous nature of the participants. We present a businesslevel conceptual model that addresses the above shortcomings. The model gives primacy to the participants in a service-oriented application. A key feature of the model is that it cleanly decouples the specification of an application's architecture from the specification of individual participants.We formalize the connection between the two-the reasoning that would help a participant decide if a specific application is suitable for his needs. We implement the reasoning in datalog and apply it to a case study involving car insurance. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.