Ontology Translation for Interoperability Among Semantic Web Services

Although this is to be based on use of shared ontologies published on the semantic web, services produced and described by different developers may well use different, perhaps partly overlapping, sets of ontologies. Interoperability will depend on ontology mappings and architectures supporting the associated translation processes. This article reviews some of the processing assumptions that were made in the development of the semantic web service modeling ontology OWL-S and argues that, as a practical matter, the translation function cannot always be isolated in mediators. The translation for service discovery, service process model interpretation, task negotiation, service invocation, and response interpretation may then be distributed to various places in the architecture so that translation can be done in the specific goal-oriented informational contexts of the agents performing these processes.