A semantic data mediator framework to support automation of web services data mediation

Abstract

Most businesses nowadays use Web Services (WS) technology as a platform to facilitate interaction between service providers and requestors. Data mediators in these services play an important role in ensuring successful interactions; however, the Semantic Web Service (SWS) still faces great challenges in providing the mediation actions that are necessary for smooth WS interactions and is thus open for further research exploration and automation in discovery, selection and composition. Many existing data mediation approaches focus on automated ontology mapping that provides only limited discussions on mediating actual instances. As such, current approaches suffer from insufficient mediation knowledge for related domains to mediate messages correctly at run time. The objective of this thesis is to construct a data mediation framework for the SWS and its associated processes that can establish data mediation automatically for WS interactions at run-time. The Semantic Data Mediator Framework (SDMF) is proposed to manage interactions between source messages and target messages by expressing the data mediation knowledge of developers in the form of semantic knowledge representation. The research steps in engineering method research methodology are adopted to identify the required improvement and design the SMDF data mediation solution. A data mediation component that mediates messages during a WS interaction between scholarly databases and local universities is developed using the proposed SDMF. The evaluation results on the semantic data mediator component using the SDMF are benchmarked with an existing middleware application that is used to support the data mediation. The evaluation results prove that semantic descriptions of the Web service message content through the SDMF are able to enhance the correctness and automation during the run time of a WS interaction