the web services based on the mentioned constraints. However all **the proposed verification strategies** work at a syntactic level, without considering the semantics of the exchanged data.

On the other hand the current research in semantic web is focused **towards the standardization**
of the ontology used by the web services with a vision of computers becoming capable of analyzing all web data. Semantic matchmaking [15, 1] and discovery of semantic web services [16, 17, 18] are two important research directions in semantic web. The underlying objective of these approaches is to compare facts belonging to different ontologies and to evaluate their compatibility. Standards like RDF, OWL, WSML etc. are developed for this purpose.

Ontology plays an important role towards enhancing the integration **and interoperability of the**
semantic web services. A significant amount of research has been done towards formalizing the notion of conflict between two ontologies. In [6], authors present a detailed classification of conflicts by distinguishing between conceptualization and explication **mismatches. In [19] authors further generalize the**
notion of conflicts and classify semantic mismatches into language level mismatches and ontology level mismatches. Then ontology level mismatches are further classified **into conceptualization mismatch and**
explication mismatch. Further research in the same direction [20] adds few new types of conceptualization mismatches. Researchers in [21] present alternative types of **conflicts that are primarily relevant to**
OWL based ontologies. However primary focus of these works is towards the interoperability between two ontologies - rather than the correctness of the protocol for information exchange with respect to the interpretation.

Ontology mapping primarily focuses on combining multiple heterogeneous ontologies. In [22] authors address the problem of specifying a mapping between a global **and a set of local ontologies. In [23]**
authors discuss about establishing a mapping between local ontologies. In [24] the problem of ontology alignment and automatic merging is addressed.

Significant amount of research has been done towards the development of the protocol. In [25]
researchers proposed a methodology for developing protocols in a **multi agent environment. They**
extend propositional dynamic logic to formally specify the protocol **and also use an extension of statecharts for visual representation. In [26] a step by step procedure is presented for the development**
of web service interaction protocols from the problem definition to the final specification. However these approaches are focused towards the development of protocol for multi agent environment. The semantics of the exchanged data is not addressed in these works.

The problem of checking compatibility between two ontologies with respect to a protocol is new and to the best of our knowledge there is no prior work on this topic.

## 7 Conclusion

In this paper we addressed the problem of detecting the presence **of semantic mismatch where the** data exchange between two ontologies is defined in terms of a protocol. We believe that the proposed methodology will be very helpful for the integration of web services **that are developed independently.** Moreover the future of internet applications lie in exchanging knowledge, where semantic conflict will be a major issue.