Web service integration via matching of interaction specifications

The automated communication of services is crucial to the success of systems such as the Semantic Web. If global standards (the use of which is problematic) are not strictly adhered to, this requires services to be able to interpret both the vocabulary of calls made to them and the structure of these calls. In this paper, we describe the lifecycle of interaction within the OpenKnowledge system, which allows services to be found, contacted and interacted with during run-time without any prior agreement on semantics. Instrumental to this work is our structure-preserving semantic matching technique, which automatically matches inputs and outputs of services with calls representing service requirements, even if the vocabulary and structure of those calls are different to those expected by the service and unknown prior to run-time. We describe in detail a scenario showing the complexity of interaction allowed by our approach, and discuss the evaluation we have done on our techniques and the encouraging results this has produced.