Service Retrieval - Dr. Nacima Mellal

In the Web service community, services may be exchanged among distributed environments. Actually, web services are described in terms of ontologies. When ontologies are distributed, arises the problem of achieving sematic interoperability. This problem is undertaken by a process which defines rules to relate relevant parts of different ontologies, called “Ontology Mapping”. The present paper describes a methodology for automatic and semantic mapping of ontologies, basing our approach on a mathematical model called Information Flow Model and denoted IF Model.

Introduction:
Interaction and exchange of information between distributed systems is a crucial topic. Systems usually need to communicate and interoperate between them, they also need to understand what they exchange. This introduces the notion of Semantic Interoperability denoted SI. F.Vernadat has determines the objectives of semantic interoperability in (1). It is the ability to exchange services and data among systems that make sense (common meaning). Ontologies present a good way to reach the SI. From most proposed definitions for the philosophical term “Ontology”, generally is seen as an explicit specification of a conceptualization (2), (3). It should give an explicit definition of concepts and relations between them.

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