Information discovery across organizational boundaries through local caching

Abstract

Web services are deployed within the restricted spaces of organizations intranets. There is a need for the creation of virtual organizations where the services offered by one organization should become accessible to other organizations. This requires exposing IT infrastructures to participants so that the information can flow easily within the virtual organization. This proposed model called Virtual Service-Oriented Architecture, or VSOA, is based on the observation that Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registries are themselves web services. VSOA is also a way to extend the existing Extended Service-Oriented Architecture model where UDDI registries are required to perform the discovery process of web services repeatedly when the similar request is placed. The proposed architecture makes the Information discovery process across organizations more flexible and efficient by introducing a Cache Registry locally within an organization. It is used to store all the results received by the requestor application about the services it needs and are available for retrieval whenever the same kind of request is placed the next time. Caching can significantly improve the response time for such applications by saving the computed results in a cache, associating the saved results with properties of the request, and serving subsequent similar requests from the cache. Introduction of Cache also reduces the communication bottleneck introduced in the previous models.