The Design and Implementation of a Semantic Service Mediation System

The service mediation that decouples service interactions is the foundation to support the service composition. The early service mediations are keyword and value-based, which require both service providers and consumers to adhere to the same data formats when defining service interfaces and requests. As such, these service mediations are inadequate for supporting interactions among services in heterogeneous and dynamic environments. In order to overcome this limitation, semantics are introduced into service mediations, for more flexible service matchings. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a novel semantic service mediation system. Different from existing semantic service mediations, by understanding semantics of service requests and service interfaces, our system supports not only one-to-one service matchings, but also multiple-to-one service correlations. We argue that, by performing service correlation systematically as part of the service mediation, the system can free programmers from understanding extraordinary details of service interfaces when enabling service composition.