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 elec- tronic Government. Service oriented architectures lay the foundation for flexible application integration and process-orientation through Web ser- vice composition. Semantically enriched Web services promise to increase the level of automation and to reduce integration efforts significantly. In this paper we present an approach for semi-automatically supporting the design of data flows between semantically described Web services which are making use of different ontologies and data representations. The approach includes a rule-based mechanism for user-transparent me- diation between ontologies. In order to validate the approach we have implemented a prototypical Cross-Ontology Semantic Web Service Com- position Tool to be used in eGovernment scenarios spanning multiple application domains.