OWSCIS: Ontology and Web Service Based Cooperation of Information Sources

The growing amount of distributed data over the internet leads to increasing needs for interoperability. Being able to take into account the meaning of information is a real challenge for suitable data sharing. The semantic web and the ontologies are relevant technologies to provide semantic cooperation of heterogeneous sources. We propose a complete architecture OWSCIS (Ontology and Web Service based Cooperation of Information Sources) which allows to query a cooperation of information sources. The semantic of the local data is expressed using local ontologies which are mapped to a reference ontology. This reference ontology can be queried by an end user to transparently access the cooperation. The different components of the architecture are described: the data providers, the knowledge base, the inter-ontology mapping process, the visualization service and the querying service. A special focus is done on the latter service.