Using semantic Web technology to automate data integration in grid and Web service architectures

While the grid and Web services have helped us support heterogeneous resource access through the use of service oriented architectures, they have not addressed the issue of heterogeneous data representation. Since service providers often describe their service interfaces using different data models than those assumed by the client, it is common for additional processing to be required to compensate for the mismatch in data formats. By utilising technology from the semantic Web, we are able to augment existing Web service systems with middleware to automatically perform data harmonisation when a syntactic mismatch occurs. To achieve this, we have developed a mapping language which can be used to annotate XML data structures with OWL concepts and properties, a mapping language engine to implement this language, and a dynamic web service invocation component to execute Web services.