Web Services provide an open standard for exposing pieces of application functionality and queries on the corporate intranet or the Web. Web Services standards such as SOAP and WSDL ensure that the precise syntax of a Web Service may be published while directory standards such as UDDI offer the promise of dynamic discovery of such services.

But even if Web Services may be discovered dynamically, each Service typically has a different language – or schema – for its input and output. Semantic interoperability therefore remains a key barrier to genuine dynamic interoperability of Web Services.

Further, semantic interoperability is key to relating Web Services in a flexible way to the back-end systems on which they rely. This relationship is key both to rolling out Web Services quickly and to providing the flexibility to update both the Web Services interfaces and the back-end systems over time.

When Semantic Information Management (SIM) is used to capture the formal business meaning of Web Services and the underlying systems and data sources they relate to, the true potential of Web Services is realized. Dynamic interoperability becomes a reality as translation scripts translating between Web Services may be inferred "on the fly" from the semantics.

Moreover, the roll out of Web Services is accelerated by inferring the relationship between the Web Services and back-end system interfaces. The integrity of the environment is automatically kept up-to-date by detecting changes and updating translation logic as needed.

For more information on semantic interoperability of Web Services, see a recent article entitled "Semantic Discovery for Web Services" co-authored by two Unicorn employees in Web Services Journal.