Service-oriented Information Integration

Services constitute the building blocks of many of today's application integration scenarios. In many cases they are merely used to overcome technical heterogenities by exposing information through standardized - and most often Web-based - technologies. The semantic integration of these highly distributed, autonomous, and heterogenous information services and the data they provide is a research field of the Information Systems group headed by Prof. Felix Naumann.

Particular research topics include:

Semantic Service Integration

A popular approach addressing the semantic heterogenity of services is to use ontologies, which are formal specifications of semantics for a certain context and which can be considered as highlevel knowledge models. In general variants of first-order logic, such as Description Logics or Logic Programming languages, are employed for the formalization. The appropriate ontological modeling of services is an open research issue.

A central task in service-oriented architectures is to connect a service provider that has advertised a service with a requester that is demanding an equivalent or similar service. The underlying matching of software specifications is a  research topic with roots in Hoare logic and a large research corpus on program verification and software component retrieval. Nevertheless, the matching of service specifications on the basis of ontologies promises more feasibility and automation due to the abstraction aspect that is inherent to both services and ontologies.

Data Cleansing Services

Peer Data Management

Information as a Service