The WebSI architecture attacks the problem of Web Services composition in three dimensions: the use of high-level abstractions to design and generate the applications; the composition of Web services to generate Web-based applications; and integration of heterogeneous and dispersed information sources. Each one of these dimensions is based on state-of-the-art technology and produces technical innovation. In addition, all these innovative features will be deployed in an ASP environment, which is in itself innovative.

For the design of Web applications including Web Services, state-of-art solutions do not leverage conceptual modeling of Web sites, and mostly focus on vertical application skeletons, design-in-the-small and implementation productivity. Web development tools, like e.g., Broadvision and Vignette, offer pre-built components, domain-specific application frameworks and framework instantiation wizards. However, if framework customization or component integration is needed, hand coding is required. Enterprise application integration platforms, like, e.g., Silverstream, include tools for simplifying the development and deployment of component-based applications and Web services, but lack a high-level design view of the Web application front-end and do not provide tools for modeling and automatically generating the page templates needed for site presentation and navigation. To our knowledge, very few vendors offer application development tools in ASP mode (the Borland TeamSorce DSP is a notable exception), and no vendor offers ASP-enabled application analysis and design tools; therefore this proposal introduces an important and innovative aspect. In particular, the method developed at the end of the project will make use of well known WebML patterns, use cases, and vertical application frameworks, so as to make application development easier and more accessible to a large number of users, reachable through the ASP paradigm.

For the composition of Web Services, the only known solutions are through process management systems. IBM is promoting its Web Services Process Management Toolkit, which combines Business Process Management technology with Web Services. With this approach, composing Web Services allows you to choreograph and add control logic to a set of Web Services in a business process. This business process is then executed under the control of a process management system. To model and run such business processes, the Web Services Process Management Toolkit uses IBM MQSeries® Workflow. This is a heavy solution to implement in a non IBM environment, as it requires the WebSphere application server. We intend to explore and develop simpler tools to compose Web Services that will be enabled on top of standard rendering components (such as JSP or ASP+) supported by inexpensive and widespread Web Servers.

For the integration of heterogeneous data into Web Services, part of the innovation has already been developed in XML-KM. As a consequence, the XML Integration suite will include the first distributed query-processing engine for XML queries. The system handles dynamically meta-data from the sources based-on a simple discovery interface. It decomposes XQuery in maximal local sub-queries. It also handles source capabilities and optimize query through a simple heuristic based-on maximum delegation.At the best of our knowledge, there is no competing XML-based mediator. XML Global supplies an XML search engine with some similarities, but only support full text queries. IBM research (XSperanto) is evolving towards a similar approach, but is not focused on distribution yet. Furthermore, with the current project, the suite will become available for developing ASP applications willing to integrate multiple data sources. The queries will be submitted through a SOAP-based interface called XDBC (XML Database Connectivity), supporting XQuery and restricted updates. We intend to promote XDBC as a contribution to the W3C for standardizing data access in Web Services. 

The Business Application Portal (E-channel) is developed by a European-level organization aiming at achieving a better integration both internally, by coordinating the workflows and data exchanges across geographically distributed subsidiaries, and externally, by closing the gaps in the communication and management processes affecting their supply chain and distribution channel. Key and innovative aspects are:

       The Selling-Point Service Application will address the information needs of small businesses. Small size and the lack of business-oriented management results in a low IT profile, that cannot be compensated by adequate support from consultants due to their costs. The technical and business-oriented innovations of Selling-Point Service Application are:

• Ease bureaucratic processes.
• Integrate the various agents involved in the support to a small shop with an added value network implementing the whole workflow of their relationship based on a distribution of tasks, in opposition to the shallow integration with phone or email that currently exist.
• Create a two-way communication channel from key information sources to and from managers of small shops, with technical solutions of extremely low cost, thanks to ASP services that allow the reception and sending of simple information.

       The content of up-to-date Destination Information Systems should reflect the most accurate data regarding availability, prices, weather, promotions, events and information or master data of tourism objects like accommodations, cities or tourism regions. WebSI services, like personalized data export and information broker for subscribed customers, enable the exporting of selective, one-to-one delivered, tourism information from the tourist office to its partners or customers. Mostly the up-to-date information is only accessible via Web-browser and cannot directly be reused to produce documents like reports, hotel flyer or catalogues, and newsletters, which are a new personalized way to access tourism information to get an information as accurate as possible. The technology focused on active document management, to be developed in the project, removes these gaps and give users a powerful ASP-enabled service, where the user can compose its own information with other information available on the tourism server or with external services, thereby generating advertising material directly from the most accurate data available.

Internet, as it is nowadays widely used at home and work, is socialising the access to the information and is permitting to build the so called “Information Society”. Nevertheless, its success is created around the quantity of information accessible by everybody (in both senses as creator or reader) but not on its quality. This lead to a huge amount of information, useful and useless, difficult to classify, a big lost of time (and money) to find the searched information and the rather impossibility to obtain it at the right moment.

At this moment the market (the Internet community) is demanding intelligent tools for searching the desired information, to classify it depending on its quality and even to extract the knowledge of it. The challenge, today, is not to create the “Information Society” but the “Knowledge Society”.

XML has become rapidly the standard format for creating, archiving and exchanging information, as it permit to easily classify and extract the knowledge of documents. European R&D effort must be focussed in taking advantage of this technology and to place its IT companies on the edge of the XML-based applications market. Moreover, Europe must take advantage of this technology to integrate its cultural and lingual diversity, creating applications that will transform its multiple heterogeneous information islands in an exchangeable format for creating integrated Knowledge repositories. This will facilitate the creation of the European single market, the integration of the European scientific community and finally will permit the European citizens to progress.

WEBSI will contribute to these objectives, as its aim is the development of tools for translating heterogeneous information to XML format, for integrating it into data warehouses, to analyse and extract its specific knowledge and to generate ASP services upon it.