Blind-date Conversation Joining
This addresses a specific technical challenge in service-oriented computing, particularly for applications like online games, but appears incremental as it builds on existing orchestration languages and process calculi.
The paper tackled the problem of enabling clients to asynchronously join existing conversations in service-oriented applications without prior knowledge, achieving this through a 'blind-date joining' mechanism using WS-BPEL and formal semantics with COWS.
We focus on a form of joining conversations among multiple parties in service-oriented applications where a client may asynchronously join an existing conversation without need to know in advance any information about it. More specifically, we show how the correlation mechanism provided by orchestration languages enables a form of conversation joining that is completely transparent to clients and that we call 'blind-date joining'. We provide an implementation of this strategy by using the standard orchestration language WS-BPEL. We then present its formal semantics by resorting to COWS, a process calculus specifically designed for modelling service-oriented applications. We illustrate our approach by means of a simple, but realistic, case study from the online games domain.