Verifying the conformance of web services to global interaction protocols: a first step

Global choreographies define the rules that peers should respect in their interaction, with the aim of guaranteeing interoperability. An abstract choreography can be seen as a protocol specification; it does not refer to specific peers and, especially in an open application domain, it might be necessary to retrieve a set of web services that fit in it. A crucial issue, that is raising attention, is verifying whether the business process of some peers, in particular the parts that encode the communicative behavior, will produce interactions which are conformant to the agreed protocol (legality issue). Such issue is tackled by the so called conformance test, which is a means for certifying the capability of interacting of the involved parts: two peers that are proved conformant to a same protocol will actually interoperate by producing a legal conversation. This work proposes an approach to the verification of a priori conformance of a business process to a protocol, which is based on the theory of formal languages and guarantees the interoperability of peers that are individually proved conformant.