Web services federation has practical relevance because of the great and increasing availability of Web resources. This is in contrast to resources that common composition tools lack, especially in terms of abstraction and automation.

This paper proposes a solution to these concerns, pushing toward a more consistent framework that allows the simple and dynamic composition of services. It provides a mechanism to register resources and to handle them through an automatic matching between the function providing a service and the function requesting it. Finally, the complex coordination of multiple resources is enabled by a spreadsheet-based orchestration tool.

I experienced minor difficulties reading the paper, probably because of its organization. As a reader, I would have appreciated a more consistent and extended introductory section providing, among the other topics, a reinforced motivation part and a more comprehensive overview of current models and related issues.

The bibliography is not comprehensive and, consequently, most contents are not properly referenced, starting with the previous architectures developed by the authors’ research group: IntelligentPad is, in fact, continuously mentioned in the paper without any bibliographic reference. Considering the continuous technological advancements of the last few years (for example, semantic web services), it is reasonable to expect a deeper analysis of the target technological environment.

The comparative analysis clearly highlights functional omissions in existing solutions that significantly affect the end-user perspective. This implicitly suggests that the analysis of a layered structure of required functionality (not present in the paper), focusing on the extensions provided by the authors, might have had a strongly positive impact on the paper.