Web services composition: A decade’s overview

Service-oriented computing (SOC) represents a paradigm for building distributed computing applications over the Internet. In the past decade, Web services composition has been an active area of research and development endeavors for application integration and interoperation. Although Web services composition has been heavily investigated, several issues related to dependability, ubiquity, personalization, among others, still need to be addressed, especially giving the recent rise of several new computing paradigms such as Cloud computing, social computing, and Web of Things. This article overviews the life cycle of Web services composition and surveys the main standards, research prototypes, and platforms. These standards, research prototypes, and platforms are assessed using a set of assessment criteria identified in the article. The paper also outlines several research opportunities and challenges for Web services composition.