Semantic queries on service-oriented information systems

Abstract

The exchange of information and the cooperation of enterprise information systems play a key role in the development of applications based on merging data from a diversity of sources. Data sources can be stored in traditional databases and are increasingly available in semistructured formats, including dynamic web pages, which can be accessed through web forms. To alleviate the inherent heterogeneity and security issues involved in merging data sources, service paradigm, particularly data-providing services, are increasingly used to extract and to share data from various sources. In this paper, we propose a service based environment for dynamically creating applications by extracting and combining data through the composition of data-providing services. Data-providing services are described by generalized tree patterns, which are used to select the sources that are relevant to query processing. We discuss how to select sets of data-providing services to semantically cover the concepts used by an application. © 2010 IEEE.