Service description in STONE system

In order to resolve the service description problem of service composition, a service description method including mainly a input-output interface model and a data flow diagram model is put forward. By this method, the requested resources called functional objects (FO) including hardware, applications and multimedia resources, which can be accessed through network, are represented according to their input-output interfaces. The connections of requested functional objects are represented in the data flow diagram. Basing on the Input-output interface model and data flow diagram model, a service description criterion in extensible markup language (XML) is presented. A software toolkit to create service description documents automatically is also introduced, which had been used in STONE (Service syn Thesizer On Net, an application platform developed in Tokyo University for ubiquitous computing) system. This research shows that the method based on input-output interface model and data flow diagram model is an effective solution for service description.