Semantic web services based data exchange for distributed and heterogeneous systems

Data exchange is the process of exchanging data between systems online, in which heterogeneity, distribution and different semantic descriptions are the main difficulties. In this paper, a data exchange framework constructed on the architecture of Web services is proposed, in which data provider deploys Web services for data exchange and publishes description of service function and exchange data on a register center, data requester searches for web services on the register center according to his requirements on function and data. To improve precision of data discovery, a semantic matching mechanism for matching the provided and requested Web services, based on OWL-S (Web Ontology Language for Services), is presented. The matching mechanism which takes both service function and exchange data into account calculates the semantic similarity of two Web services as matching result. A prototype system is implemented to verify the proposed framework and matching mechanism.