Mapping the responses of RESTful services based on their values

The distributed nature of service-oriented architectures imposes some very interesting challenges to the participants of a service system, i.e., the provider and the client. For example, the service may change in a way that no longer satisfies the client's needs, either due to its reduced offered functionality or quality, due to its reduced availability or due to its increased price. In this case, the client may seek to replace the consumed service with another from a competitive provider. The client will also have the challenging task of mapping the elements of the old service to those of the new service, in order to apply the appropriate changes to the client application. In this work, we propose a novel approach to perform this mapping based on the data exchanged by the service and the application (i.e., the values of the input and the output parameters of the service). This technique allows us to avoid any potential ambiguities in the vocabulary or the structure of service interfaces between different vendors. Eventually, we evaluate the performance of our mapping technique on different services from two domains, namely movie and geolocation services.