Treating Shimantic Web Syndrome with Ontologies

This paper describes shimantic web syndrome, the use of “shims” to align or mediate mismatching third party Web Services that have closely related, but incompatible, inputs and outputs. The syndrome is illustrated using services from Grid bioinformatics analyses. An ontology driven treatment for managing this syndrome through semiautomated service discovery and invocation is outlined. This treatment is likely to be applicable to other domains.