Two-fold Semantic Web service matchmaking – applying ontology mapping for service discovery

Semantic Web Services (SWS) aim at the automated discovery and orchestration of Web services on the basis of comprehensive, machine-interpretable semantic descriptions. Since SWS annotations usually are created by distinct SWS providers, semantic-level mediation, i.e. mediation between concurrent semantic representations, is a key requirement for SWS discovery. Since semantic-level mediation aims at enabling interoperability across heterogeneous semantic representations, it can be perceived as a particular instantiation of the ontology mapping problem. While recent SWS matchmakers usually rely on manual alignments or subscription to a common ontology, we propose a two-fold SWS matchmaking approach, consisting of (a) a general-purpose semantic-level mediator and (b) comparison and matchmaking of SWS capabilities. Our semantic-level mediation approach enables the implicit representation of similarities across distinct SWS by grounding service descriptions in so-called Mediation Spaces (MS). Given a set of SWS and their respective grounding, a SWS matchmaker automatically computes instance similarities across distinct SWS ontologies and matches the request to the most suitable SWS. A prototypical application illustrates our approach

Enriching service semantics through conceptual vector spaces

Semantic Web Services (SWS) aim at the automated discovery and orchestration of Web services on the basis of comprehensive, machine-interpretable semantic descriptions. In that, SWS strive for automated interoperability and reusability of heterogeneous services through matchmaking of semantic capability and interface descriptions. However, to do so, established SWS reference models build on the general assumption that either (a) SWS providers subscribe to a common vocabulary to annotate their services or (b) alignments between distinct vocabularies are established. This is due to the fact that SWS descriptions are lacking sufficient meaningfulness to automatically infer relationships between syntactically different semantic annotations. In order to address these issues and to overcome the need for (a) and (b), we propose a representational approach which allows to enrich standard SWS descriptions through vector spaces, which are represented as a dedicated ontology being aligned with existing SWS standards. As a result, similarities between instances used to annotate SWS become automatically computable by means of spatial distances. Hence, our approach significantly contributes to solve the interoperability problem between heterogeneous SWS as well as SWS reference models

A comparative study of process mediator components that support behavioral incompatibility

Most businesses these days use the web services technology as a medium to allow interaction between a service provider and a service requestor. However, both the service provider and the requestor would be unable to achieve their business goals when there are miscommunications between their processes. This research focuses on the process incompatibility between the web services and the way to automatically resolve them by using a process mediator. This paper presents an overview of the behavioral incompatibility between web services and the overview of process mediation in order to resolve the complications faced due to the incompatibility. Several state-of the-art approaches have been selected and analyzed to understand the existing process mediation components. This paper aims to provide a valuable gap analysis that identifies the important research areas in process mediation that have yet to be fully explored.Comment: 20 Pages, 9 figures and 8 Tables; International Journal on Web Service Computing (IJWSC), September 2011, Volume 2, Number

Mediation enabled semantic web services usage

Abstract. The Semantic Web services has become a challenging research topic in the last half of decade. Various frameworks offer means to semantically describe all the related aspects of Semantic Web services, but the solutions to the heterogeneity problems, inherent in a distributed environment as the Web, are still to be properly integrated and referred to from the main phases of the Web services usage. Both data and process heterogeneity, as well as the multitude of functionalities required and offered by semantic Web services ’ requesters and providers hamper the usability of Web services, making this technology difficult to use. This paper emphasizes the role of mediators in a Semantic Web services architecture, illustrating how the mediators can enable the Semantic Web services usages as discovery, invocation and composition.