In order to create distributed automation systems, it is required to ensure their interoperability; however, ensuring interoperability between heterogeneous systems (using different communication protocols, data formats, and semantics) is a challenging task. Among many interoperability challenges, this paper addresses issues concerning semantic and data interoperability, namely, it provides a contribution to support the semantic compatibility verification and the generation of translators for XML messages. Translators are generated based on XML-Schemas that are annotated with a reference ontology. We base our annotations on an extension of an existing declarative annotation method. In particular our extension explicitly addresses ambiguities of annotations, schema instance mismatches and coverage mismatches that frequently occur on IoT message schemas. We have evaluated our approach based on a set of interaction scenarios from the domain of the Arrowhead Project. A tool prototype that supports the semantic compatibility verification and the generation of XML translators is available at http://gres.uninova.pt/tag/.

Inter-organizational business processes can be designed top-down: starting from a global process model, where each activity and gateway is assigned to one of the participating organizations, local processes (or views/stubs for refinement) are generated for each organization. The resulting inter-organizational process is executed by the local processes in a fully distributed manner. Implementing the data-flow in such a scenario is highly complex, both because of the combinatorial explosion of possible solutions and because of conflicting goals for implementing the data-flow. We present a flexible, heuristic algorithm for implementing the data-flow for inter-organizational processes according to various user preferences, which significantly improves over the base-line approaches proposed so far. The approach is fully implemented and a comprehensive, multi-dimensional evaluation is provided.

As service-oriented architectures are a solution for large distributed systems, interoperability between these systems, which are often heterogeneous, can be a challenge due to the different syntax and semantics of the exchanged messages or even different data interchange formats. This paper addresses the data interchange format and data interoperability issues between XML-based and JSON-based systems. It proposes novel annotation mechanisms to add semantic annotations and complement date values to JSON Schemas, enabling an interoperability approach for JSON-based systems that, until now, was only possible for XML-based systems. A set of algorithms supporting the translation from JSON Schema to XML Schema, JSON to XML, and XML to JSON is also proposed. These algorithms were implemented in an existing prototype tool, which now supports these systems’ interoperability through semantic compatibility verification and the automatic generation of translators.