Semantically enriched integration system for heterogeneous Web services

Abstract

The integration of distributed data resources is a pervasive challenge facing almost all modern application fields, especially for large-scale scientific applications. In those applications, data resources produced independently by multiple domain scientists need to be shared to accomplish a special goal. Typically, such data resources have high heterogeneity, which makes the integration process more difficult. Current Web Services have emerged as a paradigm for managing complex distributed applications. The lack of machine readability in representation prevents Web Services from supporting the effective integration of heterogeneous data resources. Our work tries to enhance Web services technology with semantic annotations and ontologies. Such semantic technologies can be used to support semi-automatic heterogeneous data conversion and integration. This paper presents the comparison of some existing systems and proposes a three-layer architecture of Semantically Enriched Integration System (SEIS), which uses ontologies for correlating different data resources available as SAWSDLs and builds OGSA-DAI workflows for reducing heterogeneities.