Ontology translation for interoperability among semantic Web services
Mark H. Burstein, Drew McDermott · 2005
Research on semantic web services promises greater interoperability among software agents and web services by enabling content-based automated service discovery and interaction, utilizing shared ontologies published on the semantic web. However, services produced and described by different developers may well use different, perhaps partly overlapping sets of ontologies, just as it is common that relational database schemas for similar or related functions are only partly compatible. Once again, interoperability will depend on ontology mappings and architectures supporting the associated translation processes. The question we ask is, will the traditional approach of introducing mediator agents to translate messages between requestors and services work in such an open environment? This article reviews some of the processing assumptions that were made in the development of the semantic web service modeling ontology OWL-S [OWL-S] and argues that, as a practical matter, the translation function cannot always be isolated in mediators. Ontology mappings will need to be published on the semantic web just as ontologies themselves are. The translation for service discovery, service process model interpretation, task negotiation, service invocation and response interpretation may then be distributed to various places in the architecture, so that translation can be done in the specific goal-oriented informational contexts of the agents performing these processes. We present arguments for assigning translation responsibility to particular agents in the cases of service invocation, response translation and matchmaking.