SOAP-enabled web services for knowledge management

The widespread diffusion of the World Wide Web among medium/small companies yields a huge amount of information to make business available online. Nevertheless the heterogeneity of that information, forces even trading partners involved in the same business process to face daily interoperability issues. The challenge is the integration of distributed business processes, which, in turn, means integration of heterogeneous data coming from distributed sources. This paper presents the new web services-based architecture of the MOMIS (Mediator envirOnment for Multiple Information Sources) framework that enhances the semantic integration features of MOMIS, leveraging new technologies such as XML web services and the SOAP protocol. The new architecture decouples the different MOMIS modules, publishing them as XML web services. Since the SOAP protocol used to access XML web services requires the same network security settings as a normal internet browser, companies are enabled to share knowledge without softening their protection strategies.