A Comparison of Data and Process Mediation Approaches

In recent years, a huge amount of effort has been invested in the area of service discovery and composition. However, surprisingly little effort is being put into the evaluation of these approaches. The SWS Challenge is an ongoing and continuous experiment in developing a common understanding of various technologies intended to facilitate the automation of mediation, composition, and discovery for Web Services using semantic annotations. The mediation scenario problems concern making a legacy order management system interoperable with external systems that use a simplified version of the RosettaNet PIP3A4 specifications. The participants are supposed to be evaluated with focus on functional coverage. However, it turned out that it is extremely difficult to assess this in an objective manner. In this paper, we describe a framework for comparison of data and process mediation approaches. As a case study, we apply our framework to perform a comparative analysis of four participants from the SWS Challenge.