Models and patterns for achieving semantic interoperability

Service Oriented Architectures represent a huge step towards providing simpler, more dynamic and cheaper integration solutions. But SOA cannot and it is not meant to solve all the heterogeneity problems inherent to enterprise integration tasks. Semantics is coming to offer the tools to enable scalable, efficient and cost effective solutions to some of these problems. Using ontologies and semantics, services can be unambiguously described, from data, functionality and behavior point of view. The purpose of this paper is to raise awareness on semantics and semantic interoperability, to review the main concepts regarding this topic such as semantic spectrum as well as the models and patterns that can be used in order to achieve semantic interoperability. Keywords—semantics, interoperability, semantic interoperability, service oriented architecture