Abstract

Service Oriented Architecture is being adopted by an increasing number of businesses in order to make their software available through the network, resulting in a
considerable growth in the number of available Web services. The need for an automated way for service integration becomes then a pressing issue. This thesis looks at the major obstacles faced when trying to achieve this goal, including the problem of �nding element mappings across service interfaces. For this, a method is proposed which employs schema matching techniques extended for the speci�cs of Web service de�nitions. A proof of concept service integration assistant is presented, and tested on several case studies. These include the collaboration between mainstream Enterprise
Resource Planning and Product Lifecycle Management software systems -a real-world scenario that illustrates the relevance of this work.