Web services and seamless interoperability

Web Services technologies are often proposed as a means to integrate applications that are developed in different middleware platforms and implementation environments. Ideally, application developers and integrators should be shielded from the existence of different middleware platforms and programming language abstractions. This characterizes seamless interoperability, in which a set of consistent constructs is manipulated to integrate both the applications or services that are located both in the same and in different technology domains. In this paper, we argue that Web Services are not sufficient to facilitate seamless interoperability. We also outline some developments that may be used in a systematic approach to seamless interoperability within the context of the Model-Driven Architecture.