Web Service Information Systems and Applications Mehmet S. Aktas 1,2 , Galip Aydin 1,2 , Geoffrey C. Fox 1,2,3 , Harshawardhan Gadgil 1,2 , Marlon E. Pierce 1 , and Ahmet Sayar 1, 2 1 Community Grids Laboratory 2 Department of Computer Science 3 Department of Physics Indiana University {maktas, gaydin, hgadgil, mpierce, asayar}@cs.indiana.edu gcf@grids.ucs.indiana.edu 1. Introduction: Information System Requirements for Web Service Grids As the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles have gained importance, an emerging need has appeared for methodologies to locate desired services that provide access to their capability descriptions. Also, as these services interact with each other within a workflow session to produce a common functionality such as earthquake prediction [PI], another emerging need has also appeared for storing, querying, and sharing the resulting metadata needed to describe session state information. In SOA-based Grids, Information Services support the discovery and handling of both static and session-related, transitory metadata associated to services. Here, we discuss the limitations in existing Information Services and introduce a novel system as a solution. We design a hybrid Information Service supporting both large amounts of relatively slowly varying data and rapidly updated, dynamically generated information. Geographical Information Systems provide very useful problems in supporting “virtual organizations” and their associated information systems. These systems are comprised of various archival data services (Web Feature Services), data sources (Web-enabled sensors), and map generating services. All of these services are metadata-rich, as each of them must describe their capabilities (What sorts of features do they provide? What geographic bounding boxes do they support?). Organizations like the Open Geospatial Consortium define these metadata standards. These services must typically be assembled into short-term service collections that, together with code execution services, are combined into a meta-application (i.e. a workflow). Thus we see that we have both stateless and stateful (transient) metadata. To address these problems, we use and extend two Web Service standards to provide information services: Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) and Web Services Context (WS-Context) in our design. We utilize existing UDDI Specifications [UDDI] and design an extension to UDDI Data Structure and UDDI XML API to be able to associate both prescriptive and descriptive metadata with service entries. There have been some solutions introduced to provide better retrieval mechanism by extending existing UDDI Specifications. UDDIe [UDDIe] project introduces the idea of