Semantic annotation of data in schemas to support data translations

In service-oriented architectures, components (devices or systems) provide services to other components, i.e., providers send data to consumers that subscribed or requested that service. However, a consumer should only request/subscribe a service from a provider if it can receive and understand the data that will be sent. This means that, before the request/subscription, it is required to check if they can interoperate (using or not a converter/translator). This paper, focused in the semantic and data interoperability issues, proposes the use of schemas, namely XML schemas, with semantic annotations to support the semantic compatibility verification and the automatic generation of data translators. The main contribution of this paper relies on the semantic annotation of specific data in the associated schemas, as well as an approach to do it. Furthermore, to annotate the meta-data, the use of an existing annotation method is proposed. To validate the proposals, a tool is currently under development. This tool receives as inputs, XML schemas and a reference ontology expressed in OWL, generating a specification in XSLT aimed for the translation of data from the provider to the consumer. The application example, with one temperature sensor (the provider) and one consumer, illustrates and validates the proposed approach.