Makaziwe Makamba, Jabu Mtsweni and Ernest Ketcha Ngassam, University of South Africa, South Africa and CSIR, South Africa

The increase need for services to handle a plethora of business needs within the enterprise landscape has yielded to an increase in the development of heterogeneous services across the digital world. In today’s digital economy, services are the key components for communication and collaboration amongst enterprises internally and externally. Since Internet has stimulated the use of services, different services have been developed for different purposes prompting those services to be heterogeneous due to incompatibles approaches relied upon at both conceptual and exploitation phases. The proliferation of developed heterogeneous services in the digital world therefore comes along with a range of challenges more precisely in the integration layer. Traditionally, integration is achieved by using gateways, which require considerable configuration effort. Many approaches and frameworks have been developed by different researchers to overcome these challenges, but up to date the challenges of integration heterogeneous services with minimal user-involvement still exist. In this paper, we are exploring the challenges of heterogeneous services and characteristics thereof with the aim of developing a seamless approach that will alleviate some of these challenges in near future. It is therefore of outmost importance to understand the challenges and characteristics of heterogeneous services before developing a mechanism that could eliminate these challenges.

Integration, heterogeneous, dynamic-integration, services, and heterogeneous-services.