Exploring Cohesion, Flexibility, Communication Overhead and Distribution for Web Services Interfaces in Computational Science

Computational science studies often rely on the availability of large datasets through the Web. Web services (WS) provide a convenient way for making those datasets available, since they rely on a standard and widely available technology. However, there are many ways to devise a Web service interface for a given dataset, and the resulting interfaces vary in their properties related to cohesion, distribution, flexibility and communication overhead, among other parameters. This paper explores these attributes and provides some directions on how they can be measured. Concretely, a well-known cohesion metric is explored as a way to characterize the possible kinds of Web service interface designs. This is discussed for a concrete distributed context of service-oriented architectures.