An Approach to Extend WSDL-Based Data Types Specification to Enhance Web Services Understandability

Web Services are important for integrating distributed heterogeneous applications. One of the problems that facing Web Services is the difficulty for a service provider to represent the datatype of the parameters of the operations provided by a Web service inside Web Service Description Language (WSDL). This problem will make it difficult for service requester to understand, reverse engineering, and also to decide if Web service is applicable to the required task of their application or not. This paper introduces an approach to extend Web service datatypes specifications inside WSDL in order to solve the aforementioned challenges. This approach is based on adding more description to the provided operations parameters datatypes and also simplified the WSDL document in new enrichment XML-Schema. The main contributions of this paper are: 1. Comprehensive study of 33 datatypes in C# language, and how they are represented inside WSDL document. 2. Classification of the previous mentioned datatypes into 3 categories: ( Clear, Indistinguishable, and Unclear ) datatypes. 3. Enhance the representation of 18% of C# datatypes that are not supported by XML by producing a new simple enrichment XML-based schema. 4. Enhance Web Service Understandability by simplifying WSDL document through producing summarized new simple enrichment schema.

@article{Alshraiedeh2015,
  title     = {An Approach to Extend WSDL-Based Data Types Specification to Enhance Web Services Understandability},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {6},
  number    = {3},
  year      = {2015},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Fuad Alshraiedeh and Samer Hanna and Raed Alazaidah},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2015.060314},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2015.060314}
}