Querying Data Providing Web Services

Abstract: Web services are often used for search computing where data is retrieved from servers providing information of different kinds. Such data providing web services return a set of objects for a given set of parameters without any side effects. There is need to enable general and scalable search capabilities of data from data providing web services, which is the topic of this Thesis.The Web Service MEDiator (WSMED) system automatically provides relational views of any data providing web service operations by reading the WSDL documents describing them. These views can be queried with SQL. Without any knowledge of the costs of executing specific web service operations the WSMED query processor automatically and adaptively finds an optimized parallel execution plan calling queried data providing web services.For scalable execution of queries to data providing web services, an algebra operator PAP adaptively parallelizes calls in execution plans to web service operations until no significant performance improvement is measured, based on monitoring the flow from web service operations without any cost knowledge or extensive memory usage.To comply with the Everything as a Service (XaaS) paradigm WSMED itself is implemented as a web service that provides web service operations to query and combine data from data providing web services. A web based demonstration of the WSMED web service provides general SQL queries to any data providing web service operations from a browser.WSMED assumes that all queried data sources are available as web services. To make any data providing system into a data providing web service WSMED includes a subsystem, the web service generator, which generates and deploys the web service operations to access a data source. The WSMED web service itself is generated by the web service generator.