This project addresses the Cross-Programme Action 12, Application Service Provision, of the IST 2001 Work programme. This action line is addressed to the development and validation of open architectures technologies and tools to allow for the provision of a variety of applications as networked services over a commonly available infrastructure.

Web Services are self-describing, self-contained, modular applications that can be mixed and matched with other Web Services to create innovative products, processes, and value chains. The Application Service Provision (ASP) paradigm, in which a provider makes services of a shared pool available to its customers, is the most promising approach to foster the industrial use of Web services. This paradigm may enable not only the outsourcing of IT resources, but also of the software design and maintenance process; it guarantees the delivery of applications with minimum start-up fee and no-upfront investment. However, this technology is still at its early stage, and promises still don’t match a technological offer, in particular in the context of data-centric applications, where external services must be used in conjunction with internal or external data sources. A crucial aspect for the success of the ASP model is the development of high-level, easy-to-use, ASP-delivered design environments, by means of which companies can develop their applications efficiently and remotely, for subsequent deployment either on their own sites or in Web farms.

The WebSI project aims at developing and demonstrating three suites of components for helping in developing data-centric Web applications in the ASP framework:

The Web Site Design Suite will focus on tools to assemble Web applications on high-level, graphic user interfaces, thus generating personalized Web sites, and deploying them according to the ASP Model.

The Service Composition Suite will provide composition abstractions in order to compose Web Services into more complex businesses.

The Data Integration Suite will provide primitives for collecting and integrating data from multiple sources; it will also support a security mechanism to control access to authorized users.

The three tool suites will be usable within the ASP Infrastructure Layer, providing also the hosting of internal services and databases.  

Three application demonstrators will be developed within the project, to help focusing the design on real problems, to demonstrate the WebSI technology, and to ensure market needs feedback.

Three XML-based technologies provide the underpinning necessary to enable services-oriented architecture on the Web: Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), and Web Services Description Language (WSDL). Existing toolkits for developing Web Services concentrate on describing (WSDL), searching (UDDI) and calling (SOAP) Web Services. They are quite primitive, in the sense that they only provide a distributed infrastructure (similar to CORBA) on the Web. Furthermore, the development environments for designing end-user applications composed of Web Services are quite primitive and not tailored for the ASP paradigm. The WebSI project will provide Java components for data extraction and integration, for composing Web Services and for assembling them in ASP-delivered applications. Components will provide transactional and security services to query and update integrated views of heterogeneous data. Overall, the project will provide an innovative environment for designing and deploying data-centric applications built from Web Services.

The component approach will guarantee low entry costs for providers and adequate provision for privacy. In general, the project will stick to the published standards, including W3C XML, SOAP, WSDL, XSL and XLL proposals, but also J2EE recommendations including JSP for Web site development, as well as standards for secure transaction delivery. Components will be available to a software integrator partner so as to become generalized solutions within its technological offer. The project will also have as a positive side effect the definition of a common business model involving tool vendors, software integrators, Web hosting companies, and end users – all playing the role of partners in the consortium –. 

The project will produce enhancements to existing products of two European start-up companies. One partner of the project is itself a start-up developing an XML-based data integration suite; another start-up company is incubated by the academic partner of the project, owner of a share of the start-up; the company delivers a Web site development environment. Both companies will enhance their existing products with the support of Web Services. A cross-fertilization of the tools developed by the two start-ups is also expected, which may lead to commercial agreement between them.

The three application companies will operate the tools resulting from the project and take advantage of them at an early time and with the full co-operation of developers. Methodological outcomes are also expected in the field of Web site development based on Web Services and XML data integration.