Abstract
Business applications are more and more often developed on the basis of Web services. The aim is to provide platform independence and loose coupling between business applications to facilitate distributed and grid computing scenarios. However, most efforts to deploy and publish Web services are manual. Manual discovery, invocation and composition of Web services in a distributed computing environment significantly hamper the automatic process of enterprise application integration. Semantic enhancements in Web services aim at making the process of Web services discovery, invocation and composition dynamic by exposing the machine understandable description of Web service capabilities and Web service requests. In this paper we compare recent dynamic Web service composition approaches. We highlight some dynamic composition issues and compare existing approaches with. respect to these issues. Based on these findings we present a new and generic semantic Web services integration and composition lifecycle to facilitate the semantic based integration and composition of Grid services. The proposed semantic Web services integration and composition life cycle explains the necessary integration phases beginning with the modeling and developing of processes as Web service composition and ending with their execution. With this lifecycle, integration hurdles among different service composition approaches will be diminished.