Journal of Computer Science 10 (8): 1428-1439, 2014 ISSN: 1549-3636 © 2014 Science Publications doi:10.3844/jcssp.2014.1428.1439 Published Online 10 (8) 2014 (http://www.thescipub.com/jcs.toc) Corresponding Author: Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Baltah, Department of Software Engineering and Information System, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Malaysia 1428 Science Publications JCS SEMANTIC CONFLICTS DETECTION OF HETEROGENEOUS MESSAGES OF WEB SERVICES: CHALLENGES AND SOLUTION Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Baltah, Abdul Azim Abdul Ghani, Wan Nurhayati Wan Ab. Rahman and Rodziah Atan Department of Software Engineering and Information System, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang, Malaysia Received 2013-12-30; Revised 2013-12-31; Accepted 2014-03-22 ABSTRACT Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a new design style that has promised to alleviate the semantic interoperability problem between Web services. Exchanging the messages seamlessly between heterogeneous Web services is required but, it is still difficult due to data heterogeneity. As a result, a noticeable number of works has been proposed with the aim of solving this problem, but yet, the problem has not been solved efficiently. Furthermore, it is important to observe the lack of sufficient approaches in the state of the art, whose purposes are semantic conflicts detection between heterogeneous messages of Web services. It is for these reasons we take a step back to the detection step before providing the solution. This study proposes a new ontology-based approach that aim at detecting semantic conflicts between heterogeneous messages of Web services. The main purposes of this approach are to detect any conflict types between the messages during message exchange process and to identify the conflict type for each detected conflict. The proposed approach plays as a vital step for improving the semantic interoperability between heterogeneous Web service messages, since it facilitate the process of addressing semantic conflicts. A real scenario was used in order to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach. Keywords: Ontology, Conflicts Detection, Semantic Conflicts, Web Services, Data Heterogeneity 1. INTRODUCTION Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a new design style for building software applications, in which the software components are loosely coupled (Sahin and Gumusay, 2008). Web services make the realization of SOA applications possible (Siew et al., 2006). Accordingly, a huge number of Web services have been provided from different providers for different application domains. From Web service implementation viewpoint, three main technologies that are commonly involved in Web service implementation, which are WSDL, SOAP and UDDI (Domingue et al., 2008). WSDL is an XML- based description language for describing the Web service interface elements such as types, messages, port type and binding (Christensen et al., 2001). SOAP is an XML-based protocol for exchanging messages between Web services (Albreshne et al., 2009). According to (Siluvai and Kumar, 2013), SOAP message consists of an envelope element, which contains optional elements include header and body element. SOAP envelop is a mandatory element that any message should have. SOAP header is an optional element for adding information to the message that would be used to SOAP intermediaries and the final destination of the message. SOAP body is a mandatory element that contains the actual message intended for the recipient of the message. UDDI is the common registry that supports the advertisement and discovery of Web services