  One of the main open research issues in Service Oriented Computing is to
propose automated techniques to analyse service interfaces. A first problem,
called compatibility, aims at determining whether a set of services (two in
this paper) can be composed together and interact with each other as expected.
Another related problem is to check the substitutability of one service with
another. These problems are especially difficult when behavioural descriptions
(i.e., message calls and their ordering) are taken into account in service
interfaces. Interfaces should capture as faithfully as possible the service
behaviour to make their automated analysis possible while not exhibiting
implementation details. In this position paper, we choose Labelled Transition
Systems to specify the behavioural part of service interfaces. In particular,
we show that internal behaviours (tau transitions) are necessary in these
transition systems in order to detect subtle errors that may occur when
composing a set of services together. We also show that tau transitions should
be handled differently in the compatibility and substitutability problem: the
former problem requires to check if the compatibility is preserved every time a
tau transition is traversed in one interface, whereas the latter requires a
precise analysis of tau branchings in order to make the substitution preserve
the properties (e.g., a compatibility notion) which were ensured before
replacement.
