Alignment infrastructure for ontology mediation and other applications

Web services are not the only application requiring ontology matching and mediation. Agent communication, peer-to-peer systems, etc. also need to find relationships between ontologies. However, they do not necessarily require the same kind of mediation as web services. In order to maximise the utility of the semantic web infrastructure, it seems reasonable to share the mediation services among these applications. To that extent we propose an infrastructure based on the reified notion of alignments and show how it can be used in these various cases.