Interoperability in eGovernment through Cross-Ontology Semantic Web Service Composition

Due to the heterogeneous structure of the public sector, the achievement of interoperability is a key challenge for comprehensive electronic government. Service-oriented architectures lay the foundation for flexible application integration and process-orientation through Web service composition. Semantically enriched Web services promise to increase the level of automation and to reduce integration efforts significantly. Furthermore, a relatively high degree of formality in key areas of government activities encourages the application of Semantic Web concepts.

This diploma thesis presents an approach for semi-automatically supporting the design and execution of data flows within the composition of semantically described Web services that are making use of different ontologies and data representations. The approach includes a rule-based mechanism for user-transparent mediation between ontologies. In order to validate the approach, a prototypical cross-ontology Semantic Web service composition tool has been implemented to be used in eGovernment scenarios spanning multiple application domains.

The essence of this thesis was presented at the European Semantic Web Conference 2006 at the Workshop on eGovernment and Semantic Web and is published in the paper.