Supporting semantic interoperability in a middleware infrastructure for the development of collaborative services

With the increasing communication demand among distributed collaborative applications, software developers are facing new challenges related to semantic interoperability issues. This article aims to present a solution based on a mediation service and ontology in order to support interoperability across specific middleware services. These services are part of a middleware infrastructure which was designed to support groupware development. To illustrate our proposal, we discuss some problems usually found when distributed groupware applications interoperation is required. Furthermore, we focus our evaluation on a mediation approach to support the interoperability in a middleware infrastructure.