Description
Service-oriented computing (SOC) has been marked as the technology trend that caters for interoperability among the components of a distributed system. However, the emergence of various incompatible instantiations of the SOC paradigm, e.g. Web or peer-to-peer services (P2P), and the divergences encountered within each of these instantiations state clearly that interoperability is still an open issue, mainly due to its multi-dimensional nature. In this paper we address the interoperability problem by first presenting its multiple dimensions and then by describing a conceptual model called generic service model (GeSMO), which can be used as a basis for the development of languages, tools and mechanisms that support interoperability. We then illustrate how GeSMO has been utilized for the provision of a P2P service description language and a P2P invocation mechanism which leverages interoperability between heterogeneous P2P services and between P2P services and Web services.