A Theory of Service Behavior tries to formalize – as the name sais – the behavior of a service. This is in contrast to the syntax of a service, that merely describes the datatypes, that need to be used – which is commodity. The behavior if a service describes the order of allowed operation calls / message exchanges with a service.
This is a similar field, that BPMN 2.0 Choreography models. However the BPMN 2.0 Choreography Model is an abstraction, while there are different detailed representations, for different purposes.
So the paper proposes, that for the purposes of service validation, (automatic) service construction, service composition and service replacement there is not yet a represenations, that allows for a closed theory – i.e. a structured solution in all cases. Actually it is an opening paper that will be later completed by describing “operating guidelines”, which are intended to fulfil this purpose.
My personal opinion is, that is it a good endeavor. Such work is needed to complete the foundation for modeling tools, that allow for more comfortable modeling consistency checks and functionality.
I especially see much benefits in consistency checking. I also have one or two patents in this area. Important in my view in consistency is a clear definition of the goal of the check and a good method to explain consistency errors to the tool user. Consistency checking is in most cases useful. One needs a little bit of patience, to make a service definition fit to another, because there is always this one unwanted execution that needs to be eliminated. But it is worth the effort, because it is better to eliminate these errors in modeling time than in runtime.
Service construction is in my personal opinion difficult. In my view there are always abiguities in such an endeavor. So I prefer “human” design plus consistency check.
Service composition promises some benefit – especially if there is a skeleton composed, which can be further edited by the human designer. Also here it is important to formulate clear goals of the service composition and to have a complete – i.e. without gaps – description of the underlying services. Especially if there is a Business Process Platform that offers services, that need to be composed, and that is model driven, this is very promising. There are also other projects working on this. I may come back to this some other time.
Service Replacement is certainly an interesting application. If a service is changed, then it is certainly worthwhile to know potentially which consuming services might be affected and which not. This may be the outcome of this part of the research.
So good work – keep it going!