Data interoperability in the future of middleware

Abstract

Data interoperability is one of the main problems of system interoperability. Indeed, it is estimated that the cost of data interoperability ranges in the billions of dollars every year. The traditional approach to data interoperability is to define mappings between different data structures and different data formats. Whereas this is surely a very important part of the problem, it is not its only aspect. Often systems need to aggregate data coming from different systems, and to reason and derive conclusions from these data. In this paper, we will review the efforts performed in the semantic web to unlock this problem and highlight trends and pitfalls.