Using Metamodels in Service Interoperability

Interoperability in service oriented environments is heavily influenced by the view that the cooperating services have on their data. Using the term service for the abstract contract concluded between a service requester and a service provider, three different data schemas have to be identified, namely the requester's schema, the provider's schema and the reference schema introduced by the service specification. Metamodeling and schema transformation approaches from the area of model driven architecture can be used to define these schemas and their mappings as well as the appropriate transformations that have to be applied to the data. This paper explains an approach towards metamodel-based service interoperability along an extended example of providing visualization services for the Bauhaus re-architecting tool