Semantics-Aware Services for the Mobile Computing Environment

Abstract

Abstract. Today's wireless networks and devices support the dynamic composition of mobile distributed systems according to networked services and resources. This has in particular led to the introduction of a number of computing paradigms, among which the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) seems to best serve these objectives. However, common SOA solutions restrict considerably the openness of dynamic mobile systems in that they assume a specific middleware infrastructure, over which composed system components have been pre-developed to integrate. On the other hand, the Semantic Web introduces a promising approach towards the integration of heterogeneous components; current semantics-based approaches are, however, restricted to application-level interoperability. Combining the elegant properties of software architecture modeling with the semantic reasoning power of the Semantic Web paradigm, this paper introduces abstract semantic modeling of mobile services that allows both machine reasoning about service composability and enhanced interoperability at both middleware and application level.

Efficient Semantic Service Discovery in Pervasive Computing Environments

“…Service-oriented architectures [11], and particularly Web Services 1 , have proved to be an appropriate architectural paradigm offering middleware support for pervasive computing environments. Indeed, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that aims at the development of highly autonomous, loosely coupled systems that are able to communicate, compose and evolve in open, dynamic and heterogeneous environments such as pervasive computing environments [5]. Web Services are then one of the realizations of this architectural style.…”

“…Specifically, ontology-based semantic reasoning enables discovering networked services whose published provided functionalities (or capabilities) match a required functionality, even if there is no syntactic conformance between them. A number of research efforts have been conducted in the area of semantic Web service specification, which have led to the development of various semantic service description languages, e.g., OWL-S 3 , WSDL-S 4 , WSMO 5 , SWSO 6 . In this context, we have developed the Amigo-S service description language [2], which is specifically aimed at services in pervasive computing environments.…”

The Amigo Service Architecture for the Open Networked Home Environment

“…We have further devised associated interoperability methods at both component/application and connector/middleware levels, which allow composing partially conforming services. Conformance relations together with interoperability methods establish semantics-based service interoperability [1]. Based on the Amigo reference service architecture and the encompassed semantics-based interoperability, we further define a device capable of being integrated into the Amigo system as any device that: (i) implements (a subset of) the reference architecture employing specific technologies; and (ii) may implement some interoperability methods.…”

“…We have employed semantic concepts to model Amigo services. Our semantic service modeling builds upon the software architecture notions of components and connectors [1]. Figure 2 depicts the mapping of the Amigo service modeling on the Amigo reference architecture.…”