A Foundational Framework for e-Services

In this paper we propose a foundational vision of e-Services, in which we distinguish between the external behavior of an e-Service as seen by clients, and the internal behavior as seen by a deployed ap- plication running the e-Service. Such behaviors are formally expressed as execution trees describing the interactions of the e-Service with its client and with other e-Services. Using these notions we formally de- fine e-Service composition in a general way, without relying on any spe- cific representation formalism. We have also provide a classification of e-Services based on relevant properties of the execution trees.