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The term `interoperability' means using data and services that are defined
independent of the application, programming language and operating system. Initially,
interoperability has been achieved by setting standards on either ends of exchange parties such
as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), The Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC),
eCo, Electronic Business using XML (ebXML), cXML, Business Process Modeling
Notation (BPMN), Universal Business Language (UBL), RosettaNet, Society for Worldwide
Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) and STandard for the Exchange of Product
Model Data (STEP). These standards enabled interoperability without human intervention,
but forced all applications to use a standard structured format. Later, object models such
as CORBA, COM, DCOM, COM+, EJB, JVM were introduced to solve the
interoperability problem. But these technologies were complex and tightly coupled, client
server-based architectures. Even though web services are loosely coupled, they require a new
layer above the existing web service stack for resolving mismatches during interoperability
of data or services or both. This paper describes such layer as a service called
semantic schema matching which is initially designed for performing schema matching over
diverse data sources and later exposed as a web service. A road map for evolving this service
for use by public clients is also discussed.
Interoperability standards such as EDI, WfMC, eCo, ebXML, cXML, BPMN,
UBL, RosettaNet, SWIFT and STEP require setting standards on either ends of
exchange parties. The idea of `know nothing about the other end' led to
service-oriented architecture. In this kind of a system, the client's role is to post and get the
required data via web service protocols (Eg., SOAP) for interoperability. Unlike the object
models, web services are loosely coupled, but require a new layer above the existing web
service stack for resolving mismatches during interoperability of data or services, or both.
Even though lot of research was done on schema matching, each application
which requires this is developing ad hoc systems for
its own domain. If a generic schema matcher service is available as a service it could be plugged in depending on
the application so that it can be used in many of the
e-commerce applications such as schema integration,
data warehousing, query processing, data integration, P2P
data management and semantic web services. |
