The document discusses syntactic mediation between services in grid and web service architectures. Syntactic mediation is required when the output of one service is not compatible with the input of another service due to different data formats, even if they represent the same conceptual data. The document proposes using ontologies and mappings between data schemas and ontologies to transform between different syntactic representations and allow services to interoperate. Mappings are described in a simple language and used by a mapping engine to transform between XML and OWL representations. This approach allows assisted mediation between incompatible services.