Web Services for Transmitting Product Information in the Context of Business-to-Business Integration

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Web Services for Transmitting Product
Information in the Context of Business-to-Busines
s Integration

• Stefan Kuhlins and Bjørn-Henrik ZinkUniversity
  of MannheimChair of Information Systems
  IIIProf. Dr. Dr. Martin SchaderGermany

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Agenda

• Introduction

• Web Services and The Semantic Web

• Conclusion and Future Work

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Online Shopping

• Example
• A consumer has decided to purchase a Sony
  DSC-P10 digital camera
• Information gathering
• A known vendor URL
• Example www.amazon.com
• Search engine
• Example www.google.com

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Search Engines

• Search for
• Sony DSC-P10 ? 136,000 hits
• Problems
• Information flooding
• Not all offers are found

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Comparing Prices

• Manually very cumbersome
• Suboptimal result

• Automation

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Price Comparisons

• Providing consumers with an overview of price and
  availability of products
• Rely on an exchange of information between
  distributed heterogeneous information systems
• Desirable to find a solution that automatically
  discovers online shops and integrates with them

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Online Shops

• Reach as many potential customers as possible
  because this raises the chances of selling
  products
• Listing product information at price comparers
• Relatively modest IT budget
• Find an inexpensive way to make price comparers
  aware of them and come across a technical
  solution that does not require highly
  sophisticated technical skills

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Information Extraction

• Wrappers
• Parse and extract information directly from Web
  pages
• When HTML pages change the wrapper must be
  adjusted manually to avoid malfunction
• XML based Web services
• Enable data aggregation and integration of
  heterogeneous information systems over the
  Internet through open standards that are widely
  supported
• Despite of semantic advances, such as, XML
  Schema, RDF, OWL, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, and ebXML, it
  cannot be certain that software routines can
  determine the intended interpretation of Web
  services operations

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Example for non-standardized WS

• Web service 1
• Products search (String regex)
• Web service 2
• Books getBooks (String author, String title)

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Research Idea

• A multitude of standard interface descriptions
  that other business applications can reuse
• Support for automatic implementation, deployment,
  discovery, and execution

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Elm_at_r Project

• Electronic Market
• http//elektronischer-markt.de/http//projekt.wif
  o.uni-mannheim.de/elmar/
• Reference implementation of the
  shopinfo.xml-Standard
• Project is aided by the Dieter Schwarz
  Stiftung
• At present, 245 participating shops and 750,000
  products

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Direct Registration

• Online Shops register directly at price
  comparers, product search engines, shop
  directories, and so on
• Shop data is submitted every time
• Name, URL, E-Mail, Logo,
• Exchange of product information is handled
  individually

Price Comparer 1
Online Shop
Price Comparer 2

Price Comparer n
Shop information
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shopinfo.xml

• Shop file
• Contains shop data
• Describes access to product information
• Download from online shop web sites
• http//www.imaging-one.de/shopinfo.xml

Price Comparer 1
Online Shop
Price Comparer 2

Price Comparer n
Shop file
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Service Oriented Architecture

• WSDL
• Contains master data
• Describes access to product information

Registry
1. register
2. find
Online Shop
Price Comparer
WSDL
3. communicate
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Agenda

• Web Services and The Semantic Web

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Web Services

• A software system designed to support
  interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over
  a network.
• It has a machine-processable WSDL interface.
• Other systems interact with the Web service in a
  manner prescribed by its description using SOAP
  messages, conveyed using Hypertext Transfer
  Protocol (HTTP) with an XML serialization in
  conjunction with other Web-related standards.

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Web Services Process

• Define semantics and service description
• Involved parties become known to each other
• Implement service description and semantics
• Exchange SOAP messages

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Semantics and Service Description

• Direct communication
• Provider publishes service description and
  semantics
• Requester publishes service description and
  semantics
• Industry or academic organization publishes
  service description and semantics

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Product Web Services Interface

• public interface ShopSearchServices extends
  Remote
• SearchResponse EANSearch(EANSearchRequest
  esr) throws RemoteException, SearchServicesExcept
  ion
• SearchResponse ProductSearch(ProductSearchRequest
  psr) throws RemoteException, SearchServicesExcep
  tion
• SearchResponse KeywordSearch(KeywordSearchRequest
  ksr) throws RemoteException, SearchServicesExcep
  tion
• SearchResponse PromotionSearch(String
  id) throws RemoteException, SearchServicesExcepti
  on

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Web Services Discovery

• Manual Discovery
• Obtaining the information directly from a
  provider
• Simple
• Lack of automation
• Discovery Mechanisms
• ebXML and UDDI registries
• Automatic discovery
• Online shops must be acquainted with the UDDI or
  ebXML standards

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Online Shop Solution

• Automatic Source Code Generation
• Automatically generate Java source files from the
  WSDL definition
• Integrating the Backend System
• Integrate backend systems into the generated
  source code
• Compiling and Deploying the Web service
• Compilation and deployment using available tools
  
• Publishing the Web service
• Using an UDDI registry, the Online Shop can
  associate the ServiceBinding with a WSDL
  tModelKey

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Price Comparer Solution

• Search Registry for WSDL compatible Web services
• Querying registries to find suitable Web services
  using a tModelKey
• Generate Client-Stubs
• Client-stubs are generated automatically from a
  WSDL file
• Invoke Web services
• Request Online shops by their service endpoints

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Summary
1.
StandardWSDLDocument
2a
2b
Online Shop
Price Comparer
5.
3.
4.
UDDI / ebXML
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Agenda

• Conclusion and Future Work

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Conclusion and Future Work

• Automatic implementation, deployment, discovery,
  and execution
• The described process can be applied in any
  business scenario that relies on information
  transmission between multiple providers and
  requesters
• Demands involvement of information providers and
  requires suitable WSDL documents
• A comprehensive comparison work including the
  latest development of Web services solutions in
  the industry will be addressed in the future

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Outlook

• Online Shops
• Improved visibility of their offerings
• Price Comparers
• Increased number of integrated online shops
• Provide more and better information
• Users
• Enhanced market transparency
• Find what they are searching for

Improved Online Shopping
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Thanks for your attention