Specification and verification of Web Services transactions

Research in transactions planning has recognized the evolvement of Web Services as an industry standard to implement transactional business processes. Web transactions are formed by integrating services in an ad-hoc manner. Distributed transaction protocols may be used to ensure data integrity. However, these protocols require some level of coordinated transaction management. Moreover, individual services must be transaction-aware in order to support necessary compensation operations. These assumptions are unrealistic in the case of the Web. We propose a data modeling and contracting framework for Web services that facilitates the verification of data integrity properties in ad-hoc transactions. The proposed framework enables services' integrator to plan their transactions while ensuring data integrity conditions.