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Interoperability in Complex Distributed Systems

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 Author manuscript, published in "11th International School on Formal Methods for the Design of Computer, Communication and
Software Systems: Connectors for Eternal Networked Software Systems Springer (Ed.) (2011)"

Interoperability in Complex Distributed Systems

Gordon S. Blair1, Massimo Paolucci2, Paul Grace1, Nikolaos Georgantas3

1
School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University, UK
{gordon, gracep}@comp.lancs.ac.uk
2
Laboratories Europe GmbH, Munich, Germany
[email protected]
3
INRIA, CRI Paris-Rocquencourt, France
[email protected]

Abstract. Distributed systems are becoming more complex in terms of both the
level of heterogeneity encountered coupled with a high level of dynamism of
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such systems. Taken together, this makes it very difficult to achieve the crucial
property of interoperability that is enabling two arbitrary systems to work
together relying only on their declared service specification. This chapter
examines this issue of interoperability in considerable detail, looking initially at
the problem space, and in particular the key barriers to interoperability, and
then moving on to the solution space, focusing on research in the middleware
and semantic interoperability communities. We argue that existing approaches
are simply unable to meet the demands of the complex distributed systems of
today and that the lack of integration between the work on middleware and
semantic interoperability is a clear impediment to progress in this area. We
outline a roadmap towards meeting the challenges of interoperability including
the need for integration across these two communities, resulting in middleware
solutions that are intrinsically based on semantic meaning. We also advocate a
dynamic approach to interoperability based on the concept of emergent
middleware.
Keywords: Interoperability, complex distributed systems, heterogeneity,
adaptive distributed systems, middleware, semantic interoperability

1 Introduction

Complex pervasive systems are replacing the traditional view of homogenous

distributed systems, where domain-specific applications are individually designed and
developed upon domain-specific platforms and middleware, for example, Grid
applications, Mobile Ad-hoc Network applications, enterprise systems and sensor
networks. Instead, these technology-dependent islands are themselves dynamically
composed and connected together to create richer interconnected structures, often
referred to as systems of systems. While there are many challenges to engineering
such complex distributed systems, a central one is ‘interoperability’, i.e., the ability
for one or more systems to: connect, understand and exchange data with one another
for a given purpose. When considering interoperability there are two key properties to
deal with:
  Extreme heterogeneity. Pervasive sensors, embedded devices, PCs, mobile
phones, and supercomputers are connected using a range of networking
solutions, network protocols, middleware protocols, and application protocols
and data types. Each of these can be seen to add to the plethora of technology
islands, i.e., systems that cannot interoperate.
 Dynamic and spontaneous communication. Connections between systems are
not made until runtime; no design or deployment decision, e.g., the choice of
middleware, can inform the interoperability solution.

We highlight in this chapter the important dimensions that act as a barrier to

interoperability; these consist of differences in: the data formats and content, the
application protocols, the middleware protocols and the non-functional properties. We
then investigate state-of-the-art solutions to interoperability from the middleware and
the semantic web community. This highlights that the approaches so far are not fit for
purpose, and importantly that the two communities are disjoint from one another.
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Hence, we advocate that the two fields embrace each other’s results, and that from
this, fundamentally different solutions will emerge in order to drop the
interoperability barrier.

2 Interoperability Barriers: Dimensions of Heterogeneity

2. 1 Data Heterogeneity

Different systems choose to represent data in different ways, and such data
representation heterogeneity is typically manifested at two levels. The simplest form
of data interoperability is at the syntactic level where two different systems may use
two very different formats to express the same information. Consider a vendor
application for the sale of goods; one vendor may price an item using XML, while
another may serialize its data using a Java-like syntax. So the simple information that
the item costs £1 may result in the two different representations as shown in Fig. 1(a).

<price>
<value> 1 </value> price(1,GBP)
<currency> GBP </currency>
</price>
a) Representing price in XML and tuple data
<price> <cost>
<value> 1 </value> <amount> 1 </ amount >
<currency> GBP </currency> <denomination> £</ denomination >
</price> </cost>
b) Heterogeneous Currency Data
Fig. 1. Examples of Data Heterogeneity

Aside from the syntactic level interoperability, there is a greater problem with the
“meaning” of the tokens in the messages. Even if the two components use the same
 syntax, say XML, there is no guarantee that the two systems recognize all the nodes in
the parsing trees or even that the two systems interpret all these nodes in a consistent
way. Consider the two XML structures in the example in Fig. 1(b). Both structures
are in XML and they (intuitively) carry the same meaning. Any system that
recognizes the first structure will also be able to parse the second one, but will fail to
recognize the similarity between them unless the system realizes that price≡cost, that
value≡amount, that currency≡denomination and of course that GBP≡£ (where ≡
means equivalent). The net result of using XML is that both systems will be in the
awkward situation of parsing each other’s message, but not knowing what to do with
the information that they just received.
The deeper problem of data heterogeneity is the semantic interoperability problem
whereby all systems provide the same interpretation to data. The examples provided
above, show one aspect of data interoperability, namely the recognition that two
different labels represent the same object. This is in the general case an extremely
difficult problem which is under active research [1], though in many cases it can
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receive a simple pragmatic solution by forcing the existence of a shared dictionary.

But the semantic interoperability problem goes beyond the recognition that two labels
refer to the same entity. Ultimately, the data interoperation problem is to guarantee
that all components of the system share the same understanding of the data
transmitted, where the same understanding means that they have consistent semantic
representations of the data.

2.2 Middleware Heterogeneity

Developers can choose to implement their distributed applications and services upon a
wide range of middleware solutions that are now currently available. In particular,
these consist of heterogeneous discovery protocols which are used to locate or
advertise the services in use, and heterogeneous interaction protocols which perform
the direct communication between the services. Fig. 2 illustrates a collection
implemented upon these different technologies. Application 1 is a mobile sport news
application, whereby news stories of interest are presented to the user based on their
current location. Application 2 is a jukebox application that allows users to select and
play music on an audio output device at that location. Finally, application 3 is a chat
application that allows two mobile users to interact with one another. In two locations
(a coffee bar and a public house) the same application services are available to the
user, but their middleware implementations differ. For example, the Sport News
service is implemented as a publish-subscribe channel at the coffee bar and as a
SOAP service in the pubic house. Similarly, the chat applications and jukebox
services are implemented using different middleware types. The service discovery
protocols are also heterogeneous, i.e., the services available at the public house are
discoverable using SLP and the services at the coffee bar can be found using both
UPnP and SLP. For example, at the coffee bar the jukebox application must first find
its corresponding service using UPnP and then use SOAP to control functionality.
When it moves to the public house, SLP and CORBA must be used.
 Fig. 2. Legacy services implemented using heterogeneous middleware
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2.3 Application Heterogeneity

Interoperability challenges at the application level might arise due to the different
ways the application developers might choose to implement the program
functionality, including different use of the underlying middleware. As a specific
example, a merchant application could be implemented using one of two approaches
for the consumer to obtain information about his wares:
 A single GetInfo() remote method, which returns the information about the
product price and quantity available needed by the consumer.
 Two separate remote methods GetPrice(), and GetQuantity()
returning the same information.

A client developer can then code the consumer using either one of the approaches
described above, and this would lead to different sequences of messages between the
consumer and merchant. Additionally, application level heterogeneity can also be
caused due to the differences between the underlying middlewares. For example,
when using a Tuple Space, the programmer can use the rich search semantics
provided by it, which are not available in other types of middleware, e.g., for RPC
middleware a Naming Service or discovery protocol must then be used for equivalent
capabilities.

2.4 Non-Functional Heterogeneity

Distributed systems have non-functional properties that must also be considered if

interoperability is to be achieved. That is, two systems may be able to overcome all of
the three prior barriers and functionally interoperate, but if the solution does not
satisfy the non-functional requirements of each of the endpoints then it cannot be
considered to have achieved full interoperability. For example, peers may have
different requirements for the latency of message delivery; if the client requires that
 messages be delivered within 5ms and the server can only achieve delivery in 10ms
then interoperability is not satisfying the solution. Similarly, two systems may employ
different security protocols; the interoperability solution must ensure that the security
requirements of both systems are maintained.

3 Middleware Solutions to Interoperability

3. 1 Introduction

Tanenbaum and Van Steen define interoperability as:

“the extent by which two implementations of systems or components from different

manufacturers can co-exist and work together by merely relying on each other's
services as specified by a common standard.” [2].
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Achieving such interoperability between independently developed systems has been

one of the fundamental goals of middleware researchers and developers. This section
traces these efforts looking at traditional middleware that seek a common standard/
platform for the entire distributed system (section 3.2), interoperability platforms that
recognize that middleware heterogeneity is inevitable and hence allows clients to
communicate with a given middleware as dynamically encountered (section 3.3),
software bridges that support the two-way translation between different middleware
platforms (section 3.4), transparent interoperability solutions that go beyond
interoperability platforms by allowing two legacy applications to transparently
communicate without any change to these applications (section 3.5), and finally the
logical mobility approach that overcomes heterogeneity by migrating applications and
services to the local environment, assuming that environment has the mechanisms to
interpret this code, e.g. through an appropriate virtual machine.

3.2 Traditional Middleware

The traditional approach to resolving interoperability using middleware standards and

platforms is to advocate that all systems are implemented upon the same middleware
technology; this pattern is illustrated in Fig. 3 and is equivalent to native spoken
language interoperability where the speakers agree in advance upon one language to
speak. There are many different middleware styles that follow this pattern of
interoperability, and it is important to highlight that these actually contribute to the
interoperability problem, i.e., the different styles and specific implementations do not
interoperate; to illustrate this point the following is a list of the most commonly used
solution types:
 RPC/Distributed Objects. Distributed Objects (e.g. CORBA [3] and DCOM [4])
are a communication abstraction where a distributed application is decomposed
into objects that are remotely deployed and communicate and co-ordinate with
one another. The abstraction is closely related to the well-established
methodology of object orientation, but rather than method invocations between
 local objects, distributed objects communicate using remote method invocations;
where a method call and parameters are marshalled and sent across the network
and the result of the method is returned synchronously to the caller. This is
similar to the style of communication employed in remote procedure calls (RPC)
e.g. SunRPC [5].
 Message-based.. Messaging applications differ from RPC in that they provide a
one-way,
way, asynchronous exchange of data. This can either be i) direct direct between
two endpoints e.g. SOAP messaging, or ii) involve an intermediary element such
as a message queue that allows the sender and receiver to be decoupled in time
and space i.e. both do not need to be connected directly or at the same time.
Examples of message queue middleware are MSMQ [6] and the Java Messaging M
Service (JMS)1.
 Publish-Subscribe
Subscribe iss an alternative messaging abstraction where the producers
and consumers of messages are anonymous from one another. Consumers
subscribe for content by publishing
publi a subscription (this can be topic-based
based, i.e.,
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based upon the type of the message, or content-based

content based i.e. the filter is fine-grained
fine
towards the content of each message); and publishers then send out
messages/events. Brokers are intermediary systems that that are deployed in the
network or at the edge which match messages to subscriptions. A match then
requires the event to be delivered to the application. Notable examples of
Publish-Subscribe
Subscribe middleware are SIENA [7] and JMS.
 Tuple Spaces.. The Linda platform
platfo [8] originated the concept of tuple spaces as a
shared-memory
memory approach for the coordination of systems. Clients can write and
read data tuples into a shared space, where a tuple is a data element much like a
database record. Tuple space middleware often differ in how the tuple space is
deployed e.g. enterprise solutions,
s such as TSpaces [9],, use a central enterprise
server to host the tuple space for clients to connect to, while L2imbo [10] and
LiME[11] distribute the tuple space evenly among peers.

Fig. 3. Interoperability pattern utilised by traditional middleware

These technologies resolve interoperability challenges to different extents,

extents the
majority focusing on interoperation between systems and machines with
heterogeneous hardware and operating systems, and applications written in different
programming languages. Hence, this
his pattern works well for distributed systems where
the parties and technologies are known in advance and can be implemented using a
common middleware choice. However, for pervasive
pervasive and dynamic environments
where systems interact spontaneously this approach is infeasible (every application

1 http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/jms/index.html
 would be required to be implemented upon the same middleware). In the more
general sense of achieving universal interoperability and dynamic interoperability
between spontaneous communicating systems they have failed. Within the field of
distributed software systems, any approach that assumes a common middleware or
standard is destined to fail due to the following reasons:
1. A one size fits all standard/middleware cannot cope with the extreme
heterogeneity of distributed systems, e.g. from small scale sensor applications
through to large scale Internet applications. CORBA and Web Services [12]
both present a common communication abstraction i.e. distributed objects or
service orientation. However, the list of diverse middleware types already
illustrates the need for heterogeneous abstractions.
2. New distributed systems and application emerge fast, while standards
development is a slow, incremental process. Hence, it is likely that new
technologies will appear that will make a pre-existing interoperability standard
obsolete, c.f. CORBA versus Web Services (neither can talk to the other).
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3. Legacy platforms remain useful. Indeed, CORBA applications remain widely

in use today. However, new standards do not typically embrace this legacy
issue; this in turn leads to immediate interoperability problems.

3.3 Interoperability Platforms

Fig. 4 illustrates the pattern employed by interoperability platforms, which can be

seen to follow the spoken language translation approach of the person speaking
another person's language. Interoperability platforms provide a middleware-agnostic
technology for client, server, or peer applications to be implemented directly upon in
order to guarantee that the application can interoperate with all services irrespective
of the middleware technologies they employ. First, the interoperability platform
presents an API for developing applications with. Secondly, it provides a substitution
mechanism where the implementation of the protocol to be translated to, is deployed
locally by the middleware to allow communication directly with the legacy peers
(which are simply legacy applications and their middleware). Thirdly, the API calls
are translated to the substituted middleware protocol. A key feature of this approach is
that it does not require reliance on interoperability software located elsewhere, e.g., a
remote bridge, an infra-structure server, or the corresponding endpoint; this makes it
ideal for infra-structureless environments. For the particular use case, where you want
a client application to interoperate with everyone else, interoperability platforms are a
powerful approach. These solutions rely upon a design time choice to develop
applications upon the interoperability platforms; therefore, they are unsuited to other
interoperability cases, e.g., when two applications developed upon different legacy
middleware want to interoperate spontaneously at runtime. We now discuss three key
examples of interoperability platforms.
 Fig. 4. Interoperability pattern utilised by interoperability platforms

Universally Interoperable Core (UIC) [13] was an early solution to the middleware
interoperability problem; in particular it was an adaptive middleware whose goal was
to support interactions from a mobile client system to one or more types of distributed
object solutions at the server side, e.g., CORBA, SOAP and Java RMI. The UIC
implementation was based upon the architectural strategy pattern of the dynamicTAO
system [14]; namely, a skeleton of abstract components that form the base
architecture is then specialised to the specific properties of particular middleware
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platforms by adding middleware specific components to it (e.g. a CORBA message

marshaller and demarshaller).
ReMMoC [15] is an adaptive middleware developed to ensure interoperability
between mobile device applications and the available services in their local
environment. Here, two phases of interoperability are important: i) discovery of
available services in the environment, and ii) interaction with a chosen service. The
solution is a middleware architecture that is employed on the client device for
applications to be developed upon. It consists of two core frameworks. A service
discovery framework is configured to use different service discovery protocols in
order to discover services advertised by those protocols; a complete implementation
of each protocol is plugged into the framework. Similarly, a binding framework
allows the interaction between services by plugging-in different binding type
implementations, e.g., an IIOP client, a publisher, a SOAP client, etc.
The Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF) [16] is a Java API, originating
at IBM and now an Apache release, for invoking Web Services irrespective of how
and where these services are provided. Its fundamental goal is to achieve a solution to
better client and Web Service interoperability by freeing the Web Services
Architecture from the restrictions of the SOAP messaging format. WSIF utilises the
benefits of discovery and description of services in WSDL, but applied to a wider
domain of middleware, not just SOAP and XML messages. The structure of WSDL
allows the same abstract interface to be implemented by multiple message binding
formats, e.g., IIOP and SOAP; to support this, the WSDL schema is extended to
understand each format. The core of the framework is a pluggable architecture into
which providers can be placed. A provider is a piece of code that supports each
specific binding extension to the WSDL description, i.e., the provider uses the
specification to map an invoked abstract operation to the correct message format for
the underlying middleware.
 3.4 Software Bridges

Software bridges enable communication between different middleware environments.

Hence, clients in one middleware domain can interoperate with servers in another
middleware domain. The bridge acts as a one-to-one mapping between domains; it
will take messages from a client in one format and then marshal this to the format of
the server middleware; the response is then mapped to the original message format.
Fig. 5 illustrates this pattern, which can be seen as equivalent to employing a
translator to communicate between native speakers. Many bridging solutions have
been produced between established commercial platforms The OMG has created the
DCOM/CORBA Inter-working specification [17] that defines the bi-directional
mapping between DCOM and CORBA and the locations of the bridge in the process.
SOAP2CORBA2 is an open source implementation of a fully functional bi-directional
SOAP to CORBA Bridge. While a recognised solution to interoperability, bridging is
infeasible in the long term as the number of middleware systems grow, i.e., due to the
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effort required to build direct bridges between all of the different middleware
protocols.

Fig. 5. Interoperability pattern utilised by Software Bridges

Enterprise Service Buses (ESB) can be seen as a special type of software bridge;
they specify a service-oriented middleware with a message-oriented abstraction layer
atop different messaging protocols (e.g., SOAP, JMS, SMTP). Rather than provide a
direct one-to-one mapping between two messaging protocols, a service bus offers an
intermediary message bus. Each service (e.g. a legacy database, JMS queue, Web
Service etc.) maps its own message onto the bus using a piece of code, to connect and
map, deployed on the peer device. The bus then transmits the intermediary messages
to the corresponding endpoints that reverse the translation from the intermediary to
the local message type. Hence traditional bridges offer a 1-1 mapping; ESBs offer an
N-1-M mapping. Example ESBs are Artix3 and IBM Websphere Message Broker4.
Bridging solutions have shown techniques whereby two protocols can be mapped
onto one another. These can either use a one-to-one mapping or an intermediary
bridge; the latter allowing a range of protocols to easily bridge between one another.
This is one of the fundamental techniques to achieve interoperability. Furthermore,
the bridge is usually a known element that each of the end systems must be aware of
and connect to in advance-again this limits the potential for two legacy-based
applications to interoperate.

2 http://soap2corba.sourceforge.net
3 http://web.progress.com/en/sonic/artix-index.html
4 http://www-01.ibm.com/software/integration/wbimessagebroker/
 3.6 Transparent Interoperability

In transparent interoperability neither legacy implementation is aware of the

encountered heterogeneity, and hence legacy applications can be made to
communicate with one another. Fig. 6 shows the key elements of the approach. Here,
the protocol specific messages, behaviour and data are captured by the
interoperability framework and then translated to an intermediary representation (note
the special case of a one-to-one mapping, or bridge is where the intermediary is the
corresponding protocol); a subsequent mapper then translates from the intermediary
to the specific legacy middleware to interoperate with. The use of an intermediary
means that one middleware can be mapped to any other by developing these two
elements only (i.e. a direct mapping to every other protocol is not required). Another
difference to bridging is that the peers are unaware of the translators (and no software
is required to connect to them, as opposed to connecting applications to 'bridges').
There are a number of variations of this approach, in particular where the two parts of
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the translation process are deployed. They could be deployed separately or together
on one or more of the peers (but in separate processes transparent to the application);
however, they are commonly deployed across one or more infrastructure servers.

Fig. 6. Interoperability pattern utilised by Transparent Interoperability Solutions

There are four important examples of transparent interoperability solutions:

 The INteroperable DIscovery System for networked Services (INDISS) system
[18] is a service discovery middleware based on event-based parsing techniques
to provide service discovery interoperability in home networked environments.
INDISS subscribes to several SDP multicast groups and listens to their respective
ports. To then process the incoming raw data flow INDISS uses protocol specific
parsers, which are responsible for translating the data into a specific message
syntax (e.g. SLP) and then extracting semantic concepts (e.g. a lookup request)
into an intermediary event format. Events are then delivered to composers that
translate this event to the protocol specific message of (e.g. UPnP) the protocol to
interoperate with.
 uMiddle [19] is a distributed middleware infrastructure that ties devices from
different discovery domains into a shared domain where they can communicate
with one another through uMiddle's common protocol. To achieve
interoperability uMiddle makes use of mappers and translators. Mappers function
as service-level and transport-level bridges. That is, they serve as bridges that
connect service discovery (e.g. SLP) and binding (e.g. SOAP) protocols to
uMiddle's common semantic space. Translators project service-specific semantics
into the common semantic space, act as a proxy for that service and embody any
protocol and semantics that are native to the associated service.
  The Open Service Discovery Architecture (OSDA) [20] is a scalable and
programmable middleware for cross-domain discovery over wide-area networks
(where a domain represents a particular discovery protocol. Its motivation is the
need to integrate consumers and providers across different domains irrespective
of the network they belong to. OSDA assumes that discovery agents (i.e. the
service registry, service consumer and service provider) are already in place. To
enable cross-domain service discovery, OSDA utilizes service brokers and a peer
to peer indexing overlay. Service brokers function as interfaces between the
OSDA inter-domain space and the different discovery systems and are
responsible for handling and processing cross-domain service registrations and
requests.
 SeDiM [21] is a component framework that self-configures its behaviour to
match the interoperability requirements of deployed discovery protocols, i.e., if it
detects SLP and UPnP in use, it creates a connector between the two. It can be
deployed as either an interoperability platform (i.e. it presents an API to develop
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applications that will interoperate with all discovery protocols cf. ReMMoC), or
it can be utilised as a transparent interoperability solution, i.e., it can be deployed
in the infrastructure, or any available device in the network and it will translate
discovery functions between the protocols in the environment. SeDiM provides a
skeleton abstraction for implementing discovery protocols which can then be
specialised with concrete middleware. These configurations can then be
‘substituted’ in an interoperability platform or utilised as one side of a bridge.

Transparent interoperability solutions allow interoperability to be achieved

between two legacy-based platforms; and in this sense they meet the requirements for
spontaneous interoperability. However, the fundamental problem with these
approaches is the Greatest Common Divisor (GCD) problem; you must identify a
subset of functionality between all protocols where they match. However, as the
number of protocols increases this set becomes smaller and smaller restricting what is
possible.

3.5 Logical Mobility

Logical mobility is characterised by mobile code being transferred from one device
and executed on another. The approach to resolve interoperability is therefore
straightforward; a service advertises its behaviour and also the code to interact with it.
When a client discovers the service it will download this software and then use it.
Note, such an approach relies on the code being useful somewhere, i.e., it could fit
into a middleware as in the substitution approach, provide a library API for the
application to call, or it could provide a complete application with GUI to be used by
the user. The overall pattern is shown in Fig. 7. The use of logical mobility provides
an elegant solution to the problem of heterogeneity; applications do not need to know
in advance the implementation details of the services they will interoperate with,
rather they simply use code that is dynamically available to them at run-time.
However, there are fewer examples of systems that employ logical mobility to resolve
interoperability because logical mobility is the weakest of the interoperability
 approaches; it relies on all applications conforming to the common platform for
executable software to be deployed. We now discuss two of these examples.

Fig. 7. Interoperability pattern utilised by Logical Mobility Solutions

SATIN [22] is a low footprint component based middleware that composes

applications and the middleware itself into a set of deployable capabilities (a unit of
functionality), for example, a discovery mechanism or compression algorithm. At the
heart of SATIN is the ability to advertise and middleware capabilities. For example, a
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host uses SATIN to lookup the required application services; the interaction
capabilities are then downloaded to allow the client to talk to the service.
Jini [23] is a Java based service discovery platform that provides an infrastructure
for delivering services and creating spontaneous interactions between clients and
services regardless of their hardware or software implementation. New services can
be added to the network, old services removed and clients can discover available
services all without external network administration. When an application discovers
the required service, the service proxy is downloaded to their virtual machine so that
it can then use this service. A proxy may take a number of forms: i) the proxy object
may encapsulate the entire service (this strategy is useful for software services
requiring no external resources); ii) the downloaded object is a Java RMI stub, for
invoking methods on the remote service; and iii) the proxy uses a private
communication protocol to interact with the service's functionality. Therefore, the Jini
architecture allows applications to use services in the network without knowing
anything about the wire protocol that the service uses or how the service is
implemented.

4 Semantics-based Interoperability Solutions

4.1 Introduction

The previous middleware-based solutions support interoperation by abstract protocols

and language specifications. But, by and large they ignore the data heterogeneity
dimension. As highlighted in Section 2.1, for two parties to interoperate it is not
enough to guarantee that the data flows across, but that they both build a semantic
representation of the data that is consistent across the components boundaries. The
data problem has been defined in Hammer and McLeod [24] as:

“variations in the manner in which data is specified and structured in

different components. Semantic heterogeneity is a natural consequence of
 the independent creation and evolution of autonomous databases which are
tailored to the requirements of the application system they serve”.

Historically the problem has been well known in the database community where there
is often the need to access information on different database which do not share the
same data schema. More recently, with the advent of the open architectures, such as
Web Services, the problem is to guarantee interoperability at all levels. We now look
at semantics-based solutions to achieving interoperability: first, the Semantic Web
Services efforts, second their application to middleware solutions, and third the
database approaches.

4.2 Semantic Web Services

The problem of data interoperability is crucial to address the problem of service

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composition since, for two services to work together, they need to share a consistent
interpretation of the data that they exchange. To this extent a number of efforts, which
are generically known as Semantic Web Services, attempt to enrich the Web Services
description languages with a description of the semantics of the data exchanged in the
input and output messages of the operations performed by services. The result of
these efforts are a set of languages that describe both the orchestration of the services'
operations, in the sense of the possible sequences of messages that the services can
exchange as well as the meanings of these messages with respect to some reference
ontology.

Fig. 8. OWL-S Upper Level Structure

OWL-S [26] and its predecessor DAML-S [25] have been the first efforts to exploit
Semantic Web ontologies to enrich descriptions of services. The scope of OWL-S is
quite broad, with the intention to support both service discovery through a
representation of the capabilities of services, as well as service composition and
invocation through a representation of the semantics of the operations and the
messages of the service. As shown in Fig. 8, services in OWL-S are described at three
different levels. The Profile describes the capabilities of the service in terms of the
information transformation produced by the service, as well as the state
 transformation that the service produces; the Process (Model) that describes the
workflow of the operations performed by the service, as well as the semantics of these
operations, and the Grounding that grounds the abstract process descriptions to the
concrete operation descriptions in WSDL.
In more detail, the information transformation described in the Profile is
represented by the set of inputs that the service expects and outputs that it is expected
to produce, while the state transformation is represented by a set of conditions
(preconditions) that need to hold for the service to execute correctly and the results
that follow the execution of the service. For example, a credit card registration
service may produce an information transformation that takes personal information as
input, and returns the issued credit card number as output; while the state
transformation may list a number of (pre)conditions that the requester needs to satisfy,
and produce the effect that the requester is issued the credit card corresponding to the
number reported in output.
The Process Model and Grounding relate more closely to the invocation of the
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service and therefore address more directly the problem of data interoperability. The
description of processes in OWL-S is quite complicated, but in a nutshell they
represent a transformation very similar to the transformation described by the Profile
in the sense that they have inputs, outputs, preconditions and results that describe the
information transformation as well as the state transformation which results from the
execution of the process. Furthermore, processes are divided into two categories:
atomic processes that describe atomic actions that the service can perform, and
composite processes that describe the workflow control structure.

Fig. 9. The structure of the OWL-S process grounding

In turn atomic processes “ground” into WSDL operations as shown in Fig. 9 by

mapping the abstract semantic descriptions of inputs and outputs of process into the
WSDL message structures. In more detail, the grounding specifies which operations
correspond to an atomic process, and how the abstract semantic representation is
transformed in the input messages of the service or derived from the output messages.
One important aspect of the Grounding is that it separates the OWL-S description of
 the service from the actual implementation of the service, and therefore, every service
which can be expressed in WSDL, can be represented in OWL-S. As a result of the
service description provided by OWL-S the client service would always know how to
derive the message semantics from the input/output messages of the service. Ideally
therefore, the client may represent its own information at the semantic level, and then
ground it to into the messages exchanged by the services.
Analysis of OWL-S. OWL-S provides a mechanism for addressing the data
semantics; however it has failed in a number of aspects. First, many aspects of the
service representation are problematic; for example, it is not clear what is the relation
between the data representation of the atomic processes and the input/output
representation of the complex (control flow) processes. Second, OWL-S is limited to
a strict client/server model, as supported by WSDL, as a consequence it is quite
unclear how OWL-S can be used to derive interoperability connectors in other types
of systems. Third, OWL-S assumes the existence of an ontology that is shared
between the client and server; this pushes the interoperability problem one level up.
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Of course the next data interoperability question is ``what if there is not such a shared
ontology?''
SA-WSDL. Semantic Web Services reached the standardization level with SA-
WSDL [27], which defines a minimal semantic extension of WSDL. SA-WSDL
builds on the WSDL distinction between the abstract description of the service, which
includes the WSDL 2.0 attributes Element Declaration, Type Definition and Interface,
and the concrete description that includes Binding and Service attributes which
directly link to the protocol and the port of the service. The objective of SA-WSDL is
to provide an annotation mechanism for abstract WSDL. To this extent it extends
WSDL with new attributes:
1. modelReference, to specify the association between a WSDL or XML
Schema component and a concept in some semantic model;
2. liftingSchemaMapping and loweringSchemaMapping, that are added to
XML Schema element declarations and type definitions for specifying
mappings between semantic data and XML.
The modelReference attribute has the goal of defining the semantic type of the WSDL
attribute to which it applies; the lifting and lowering schema mappings have a role
similar to the mappings in OWL-S since their goal is to map the abstract semantic to
the concrete WSDL specification. For example, when applied to an input message, the
model reference would provide the semantic type of the message, while the
loweringSchemaMapping would describe how the ontological type is transformed into
the input message.
A number of important design decisions were made with SA-WSDL to increase its
applicability. First, rather than defining a language that spans across the different
levels of the WS stack, the authors of SA-WSDL have limited their scope to
augmenting WSDL, which considerably simplifies the task of providing a semantic
representation of services (but also limits expressiveness). Specifically, there is no
intention in SA-WSDL to support the orchestration of operations. Second, there is a
deliberate lack of commitment to the use of OWL [28] as an ontology language or to
any other particular semantic representation technology. Instead, SAWSDL provides
a very general annotation mechanism that can be used to refer to any form of semantic
markup. The annotation referents could be expressed in OWL, in UML, or in any
 other suitable language. Third, an attempt has been made to maximize the use of
available XML technology from XML schema, to XML scripts, to XPath, with the
attempt to lower the entrance barrier to early adopters.
Analysis of SA-WSDL. Despite these design decisions that seem to suggest a
sharp distinction from OWL-S, SA-WSDL shares features with OWL-S' WSDL
grounding. In particular, both approaches provide semantic annotation attributes for
WSDL, which are meant to be used in similar ways. It is therefore natural to expect
that SAWSDL may facilitate the specification of the Grounding of OWL-S Web
Services, a proposal in this direction has been put forward in [29]. The apparent
simplicity of the approach is somewhat deceiving. First, SA-WSDL requires a
solution to the two main problems of the semantic representation of Web Services:
namely the generation and exploitation of ontologies, and the mapping between the
ontology and the XML data that is transmitted through the wire. Both processes are
very time consuming. Second, there is no obligation what-so-ever to define a
modelReference or a schemaMapping for any of the attributes of the abstract WSDL,
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with the awkward result that it is possible to define the modelReference of a message
but not how such model maps to the message, therefore it is impossible to map the
abstract input description to the message to send to the service, or given the message
of the service to derive its semantic representation. Conversely, when
schemaMapping is given, but not the modelReference, the mapping is know but not
the expected semantics of the message, with the result that it is very difficult to reason
on the type of data to send or to expect from a service.
Web Service Modelling Ontology (WSMO) aims at providing a comprehensive
framework for the representation and execution of services based on semantic
information. Indeed, WSMO has been defined in conjunction with WSML (Web
Service Modelling Language) [30], which provides the formal language for service
representation, and WSMX (Web Service Modelling eXecution environment) [31]
which provides a reference implementation for WSMO. WSMO adopts a very
different approach to the modelling of Web Services than OWL-S and in general the
rest of the WS community. Whereas the Web Service Representation Framework
concentrates on the support of the different operations that can be done with Web
Services, namely discovery with the Service Profile as well as UDDI [32],
composition with the Process Model as well as BPEL4WS [33] and WS-CDL [34],
and invocation with the Service Grounding, WSDL or SA-WSDL, WSMO provides a
general framework for the representation of services that can be utilized to support the
operations listed above, but more generally to reason about services and
interoperability. To this extent it identifies four core elements:
 Web Services: which are the computational entities that provide access to the
services. In turn their description needs to specify their capabilities,
interfaces and internal mechanisms.
 Goals: that model the user view in the Web Service usage process.
 Ontologies provide the terminology used to describe Web Services and
Goals in a machine processable way that allow other components and
applications to take actual meaning into account.
 Mediators: that handle interoperability problems between different WSMO
elements. We envision mediators as the core concept to resolve
incompatibilities on the data, process and protocol level.
 What is striking about WSMO with respect to the rest of the WS efforts (semantic
and not) is the representation of goals and mediators as “first class citizens”. Both
goals and mediators are represented as ``by product'' by the rest of the WS
community. Specifically, in other efforts the users' goals are never specified, rather
they are manifested through the requests that are provided to a service registry such as
UDDI or to a service composition engine; on the other side mediators are either a type
of service and therefore indistinguishable from other services, or generated on the fly
through service composition to deal with interoperability problems. Ontologies are
also an interesting concept in WSMO, because WSMO does not limit itself to use
existing ontology languages, as in the case of OWL-S that is closely tied to OWL, nor
it is completely agnostic as in the case of SA-WSDL. Rather WSMO relies on
WSML which defines a family of ontological languages which are distinguished by
logic assumptions and expressivity constraints. The result is that some WSML sub-
languages are consistent (to some degree) with OWL, while others are inconsistent
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with OWL and relate instead to the DL family of logics.

Despite these differences, the description of Web Services has strong relations to
other Web Services efforts. In this direction, WSMO grounds on the SA-WSDL
effort (indeed SA-WSDL has been strongly supported by the WSMO initiative).
Furthermore, the capabilities of a Web Service are defined by the state and
information transformation produced by the execution of the Web Service, as was the
case in OWL-S. The Interface of a Web Service is defined by providing a
specification of its choreography which defines how to communicate with the Web
Service in order to use its functions; and by the orchestration that reveals how the
functionality of the service is achieved by the cooperation of more elementary Web
Service providers. Of particular interest to addressing interoperability problems,
WSMO defines three types of mediators:
1. Data Level Mediation - mediation between heterogeneous data sources,
they are mainly concerned with ontology integration.
2. Protocol Level Mediation - mediation between heterogeneous
communication protocols, they relate to choreographies of Web Services
that ought to interact.
3. Process Level Mediation - mediation between heterogeneous business
processes; this is concerned with mismatch handling on the business logic
level of Web Services and they relate to the orchestration of Web Services.

Analysis of WSMO. WSMO put a strong emphasis on mediation and, as discussed

above, it defines mediation as a "first class" citizen. The problem with WSMO is that
that the WSMO project proposed an execution semantics for mediators [31] [35] but
so far no theory or algorithm on how to construct mediators automatically has been
proposed by the project. Somehow, it is curious that mediation is one of the
fundamental elements of the approach while choreography is left to a secondary role
within the specification of service definitions. Essentially it moves service
composition to a secondary role in the theory.
 4.3 Semantic Middleware

A number of research efforts have investigated middleware that support semantic

specification of services for pervasive computing. These solutions mainly focus on
providing middleware functionalities enabling semantic service discovery and
composition as surveyed hereafter. The Task Computing project [36] is an effort for
ontology-based dynamic service composition in pervasive computing environments. It
relies on the UPnP service discovery protocol, enriched with semantic service
descriptions given in OWL-S. Each user of the pervasive environment carries a
service composition tool on his/her device that discovers on the fly available services
in the user's vicinity and suggests to the user a set of possible compositions of these
services. The user may then select the right composition among the suggested ones.
IGPF (Integrated Global Pervasive Computing Framework) [37] introduces a
semantic Web Services-based middleware for pervasive computing. This middleware
builds on top of the semantic Web paradigm to share knowledge between the
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heterogeneous devices that populate pervasive environments. The idea behind this
framework is that information about the pervasive environments (i.e., context
information) is stored in knowledge bases on the Web. This allows different pervasive
environments to be semantically connected and to seamlessly pass user information
(e.g., files/contact information), which allows users to receive relevant services.
Based on these knowledge bases, the middleware supports the dynamic composition
of pervasive services modelled as Web Services. These composite services are then
shared across various pervasive environments via the Web.
The Ebiquity group describes a semantic service discovery and composition
protocol for pervasive computing. The service discovery protocol, called GSD
(Group-based Service Discovery) [38], groups service advertisements using an
ontology of service functionalities. In this protocol, service advertisements are
broadcasted to the network and cached by the networked nodes. Then, service
discovery requests are selectively forwarded to some nodes of the network using the
group information propagated with service advertisements. Based on the GSD service
discovery protocol, the authors define a service composition functionality for
infrastructure-less mobile environments [39]. Composition requests are sent to one of
the composition managers of the environment, which performs a distributed discovery
of the required component services.
The combined work in [40] and [41] introduces an efficient, semantic, QoS-aware
service-oriented middleware for pervasive computing. The authors propose a
semantic service model to support interoperability between existing semantic but also
plain syntactic service description languages. The model further supports formal
specification of service conversations as finite state automata, which enables
automated reasoning about service behaviour independently of the underlying
conversation specification language. Moreover, the model supports the specification
of service non-functional properties to meet the specific requirements of pervasive
applications. The authors further propose an efficient semantic service registry. This
registry supports a set of conformance relations for matching both syntactic and rich
semantic service descriptions, including non-functional properties. Conformance
relations evaluate the semantic distance between service descriptions and rate services
with respect to their suitability for a specific client request, so that selection can be
 made among them. Additionally, the registry supports efficient reasoning on semantic
service descriptions by semantically organizing such descriptions and minimizing
recourse to ontology-based reasoning, which makes it applicable to highly interactive
pervasive environments. Lastly, the authors propose flexible QoS-aware service
composition towards the realization of user-centric tasks abstractly described on the
user's handheld. Flexibility is enabled by a set of composition algorithms that may be
run alternatively according to the current resource constraints of the user's device.
These algorithms support integration of services with complex behaviours into tasks
also specified with a complex behaviour; and this is done efficiently relying on
efficient formal techniques. The algorithms further support the fulfilment of the QoS
requirements of user tasks by aggregating the QoS provided by the composed
networked services.
The above surveyed solutions are indicative of how ontologies have been
integrated into middleware for describing semantics of services in pervasive
environments. Semantics of services, users and the environment are put into semantic
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descriptions, matched for service discovery, and composed for achieving service
compositions. Focus is mainly on functional properties, while non-functional ones
have been less investigated. Then, efficiency is a key issue for the resource-
constrained pervasive environments, as reasoning based on ontologies is costly in
terms of computation.

4.4 Beyond Web Services: DB Federation

The problem of data interoperation is by no means restricted to Web Services and

middleware, rather it has been looked at the DB community for a long time. In this
context, the data problem has been widely studied by the DB community while
addressing the task of DB federation. Despite of the importance of the information
stored in DBs, because of the way DBs and organizations evolve, the information
stored on different databases is often very difficult to integrate. In this context
"Database federation is one approach to data integration in which middleware,
consisting of a relational database management system, provides uniform access to a
number of heterogeneous data sources" [42]. Federated Data sources have a lot in
common with the heterogeneous systems to be connected. They need to federate
autonomous databases which are autonomously maintained, therefore they need to
support a high degree of heterogeneity both at the architectural level, in the sense that
they should host different version of databases made by different vendors as well
support data heterogeneity because different nodes may follow different data schema.
The standard solution to the problem of data interoperability is to provide Table
User Defined Functions (T-UDF) [42] which reformat the data from one database
and present it in a format that is consistent with the format of a different data-base.
For example, if one database provides address book information, a programmer may
define a T-UDF addressbook()which reformats the data in the appropriate way, and
then retrieve the data by using the SQL command FROM TABLE addressbook() in
the query. T-UDF hardly provides a solution to the problem of data interoperability
since they require a programmer that reformats the data from one data-schema to
another.
 Since the definition of translation functions as the T-UDF functions above is a very
expensive process a considerable effort has been put into learning the translation
between data-base schemata. Examples of these translations are provided in [43] [44].
They exploit a combination of machine learning, statistical processing and natural
language lexical semantics to "guess" how two data-base schemata correspond. In
Section 5.4 similar tools for ontology matching are analyzed more in detail.
The results of these mapping processes are mappings between data schemata that
are correct up to a degree of confidence. The user should then find a way to deal with
the reduced confidence in the results. One proposal in this direction has been provided
by Trio [45], a data-base management system that extends the traditional data model
to include data accuracy and lineage. Within Trio it is possible to express queries of
the sort "find all values of X with approximation with confidence greater than K".
The approaches above ignore the most important information that is required for
data mapping namely the explicit annotation of data semantics. Above, we discussed
T-UDT as a mechanism for data translation mappings, but the problem with any form
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of mapping is that it makes assumptions on the semantics of the schemata that it is

mapping across. There is therefore neither guarantee that these mappings are correct
[46] nor that they will generalize if and when the schemata are modified. The
automatic mapping mechanisms above, try to circumvent the problem of explicit
semantics by using learning inference. But they assume semantics in the form of
background knowledge such as lexical semantics without any guarantee that the
background knowledge is relevant for the specific transformation. Essentially, the
lack of explicit semantics emerges as an error in the accuracy of the transformation.
The development of ontologies, in the sense of shared data structures, is an
alternative to the methods produced above. Essentially, instead of mapping all
schemata directly in a hardcoded way as suggested by the T-UDT methods or try to
guess the relation between schemata as suggested by the learning mechanisms,
schemata are mapped to a unique "global" schema, indeed an ontology, from which
direct mappings are derived. In this model the ontology provides the reference
semantic for all schemata. The advantage of this model is that the DB provider could
in principle provide the mapping to the ontology possibly removing the
misinterpretation problem.
There are a number of problems of this approach. First, the ontology should be
expressive enough to express all information within all the schemata in the federated
databases. This implicitly requires a mechanism for extensible ontologies since
adding new databases may require an extension of the ontology. Second, the
derivation of mapping rules is proven to have an NP worst case computational
complexity [47].

4.4 Raising Interoperability one level up

The discussion about ontologies above immediately raises the question of whether
and to what extent ontologies just push the interoperability problem somewhere else.
Ultimately, what guarantees that the interoperability problems that we observe at the
data structure level do not appear again at the ontology level? Suppose that different
middlewares refer to different ontologies, how can they interoperate?
 The ideal way to address this problem is to construct an alignment ontology, such
as SUMO5, which provide a way to relate concepts in the different ontologies.
Essentially, the alignment ontology provides a mapping that translates one ontology
into the other. Of course, the creation of alignment ontologies not only requires
efforts, but more importantly, it requires a commitment so that the aligning ontology
is consistent with all ontologies to be aligned.
Such alignment ontologies, when possible, are very difficult to build and very
expensive. To address this problem, in the context of the semantic web there is a very
active subfield that goes under the label of Ontology Matching [48][49] which
develops algorithms and heuristics to infer the relation between concepts in different
ontologies. The result of an ontology matcher is a set of relations between concepts in
different ontologies, and a level of confidence that that these relations hold. For
example, an ontology matcher may infer that the concept Price in one ontology is
equivalent to Cost in another ontology with a confidence of 0.95. In a sense, the
confidence value assigned by the ontology matcher is a measure of the quality of the
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relations specified.
Ontology matching provides a way to address the problem of using different
ontologies without pushing the data interoperability problem somewhere else. But
this solution comes at a cost of the confidence on the on the interoperability solution
adopted and ultimately on the overall system.

5 Analysis

The results of the state of the art investigation in Sections 3 and 4 shows two
important things; first, there is a clear disconnect between the main stream
middleware work and the work on application, data, and semantic interoperability;
second, none of the current solutions addresses all of the requirements of dynamic
pervasive systems as highlighted in the interoperability barriers in Section 2.
With respect to the first problem, it is clear that two different communities evolved
independently. The first one, addressing the problems of middleware, has made a
great deal of progress toward middleware that support sophisticated discovery and
interaction between services and components. The second one, addressing the
problem of semantic interoperability between services, however, inflexibly assuming
Web Services as the underlying middleware; or the problem of semantic
interoperability between data intensive components such as databases. The section on
semantic middleware shows that ultimately the two communities are coming together,
but a great deal of work is still required to merge the richness of the work performed
on both sides.

5 SUMO stands for: Suggested Upper Merged Ontology. It is available at:

http://www.ontologyportal.org/}
 Table 1. Evaluation summary of effectiveness of interoperability solutions against each of
the interoperability barriers

SD = Discovery
I = Interaction
D= Data
A = Application
N=Non-functional
SD I D A N Transparency
CORBA X CORBA for all
Web Services X WSDL & SOAP for all
ReMMoC X X Client-side middleware
UIC X Client-side middleware
WSIF X Client-side middleware
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MDA X Platform Independent models

UniFrame X Platform Specific models
ESB X Bridge connector
MUSDAC X Connection to middleware
INDISS X Yes
uMiddle X X Yes
OSDA X Yes
SeDiM X X Yes
SATIN X X Choice of SATIN for all
Jini X Choice of Jini for all
Semantic X X Choice of same semantic
Middleware middleware for all
Semantic Web X X X WSDL for all plus commitment
Services on a semantic framework and
ontologies

With respect to the second problem, namely addressing the interoperability barriers
from Section 2 we pointed out that in such systems endpoints are required to
spontaneously discover and interact with one another and therefore these three
fundamental dimensions are used to evaluate the different solutions:
1. Does the approach resolve (or attempt to resolve) differences between discovery
protocols employed to advertise the heterogeneous systems? [Discovery
column]
2. Does the approach resolve (or attempt to resolve) differences between
interaction protocols employed to allow communication with a system?
[Interaction column]
3. Does the approach resolve (or attempt to resolve) data differences between the
heterogeneous systems? [Data column]
4. Does the approach resolve (or attempt to resolve) the differences in terms of
application behaviour and operations? [Application column]
 5. Does the approach resolve (or attempt to resolve) the differences in terms of
non-functional properties of the heterogeneous system? [Non-functional
column]
The summary of this evaluation is in Table 1 (an x indicates: resolves or attempts
to). This shows that no solution attempts to resolve all five dimensions of
interoperability. Those that concentrate on application and data e.g. Semantic Web
Services rely upon a common standard (WSDL) and conformance by all parties to use
this with semantic technologies. Hence, transparent interoperability between
dynamically communicating parties cannot be guaranteed. Semantic Web Services
have a very broad scope, including discovery interaction and data interoperability, but
these provide only a primitive support and languages to express the data dimension in
the context of middleware solutions.
The transparency column shows that only the transparent interoperability solutions
achieve interoperability transparency between all parties (however only for a subset of
the dimensions). The other entries show the extent to which the application endpoint
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(client, server, peer, etc.) sees the interoperability solution. ReMMoC, UIC and WSIF
rely on clients building the applications on top of the interoperability middleware; the
remainder rely on all parties in the distributed system committing to a particular
middleware or approach.

6 Conclusions and Future Work

This chapter has investigated the problem of interoperability in the complex

distributed systems of today, with the added complexity stemming from the extreme
level heterogeneity encountered in such systems coupled with the increasing level of
dynamism of such systems which results in the need for spontaneous communication.
The chapter highlights the key barriers to interoperability coupled with a discussion of
solutions to interoperability featuring the research in the middleware community and
related research on semantic interoperability. The most striking aspect of this study is
that, while both communities focus on key interoperability problems, research efforts
have to a large extent been disjoint. The other striking feature is that, despite
considerable research efforts into interoperability dating back to the early 1980s, this
remains a poorly understood area and currently solutions simply do not meet the
needs on the complex distributed systems of today, particularly in terms of the levels
of heterogeneity and dynamism as mentioned above.
The CONNECT project, an initiative funded under the Future and Emerging
Technologies programme within the ICT theme of the European Commission’s
Framework programme, is taking a novel approach to the study of interoperability in
complex distributed systems, going back to basics, and taking input from a variety of
sub-disciplines including the middleware and semantic web communities, but also
looking at supportive areas such as formal semantics of distributed systems, learning
and synthesis technologies and support for dependable distributed systems. We
propose an approach that:
• places semantic understanding of concepts at the heart of achieving
interoperability,
 •seeks a dynamic approach to interoperability where appropriate infrastructure
is generated on-the-fly for the current context (emergent middleware), and this
involves enabling technologies such as learning and synthesis of run-time
connectors,
• grounds itself in formal semantics enabling validation and verification to be
carried out,
• addresses the dependability requirements of modern distributed systems,
including meeting the associated non-functional requirements in highly
heterogeneous environments,
• supports dynamism allowing currently deployed solutions to be constantly
monitored and adapted to changing context.
The rest of the book unfolds this story in more detail with chapter 2 providing an
overview of the Connect architecture and other chapters unfolding key enabling
technologies behind this approach.
inria-00629057, version 1 - 4 Oct 2011

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