Designing a Document Retrieval Service with Onto⇔SOA

We describe Onto⇔SOA – an approach to integrate ontologies and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) to provide a simple yet effective mechanism for representing and exploiting both conceptual and behavioral domain aspects. We interpret SOA as an architectural style constrained to induce the domain alignment and loose coupling characteristics on a compliant architecture. By introducing ontologies into SOA we enhance these characteristics and supply an explicit conceptual domain model facilitating interoperability between a service and a consumer. We apply Onto⇔SOA to the document retrieval task that provides a basis for comparing the proposed approach to Semantic Web Services.