Lightweight Ontology-Based Service Discovery in Mobile Environments

Abstract

The current ever-growing evolution of mobile technologies suggests the possibility of accessing services, in an itinerant and ubiquitous way, through many kinds of mobile devices (laptops, palmtops, cellular phones and so on). On the other hand, the highly dynamic and context-dependent requirements of services in distributed environments motivate and recommend the use of ontology-based techniques and tools to automatically locate services that fulfil a given user request. Our aim in this work is to propose a lightweight ontology-based approach to allow the service discovery on mobile terminals, taking into account limited user interactions supported by this kind of devices. In the proposed approach, the user can specify the requested service in terms of expected capabilities. A semantic-enriched framework to describe services and an ontology-based discovery approach where such framework is exploited was applied to find services fulfilling the user needs, combining together different kinds of comparison strategies that provide a flexible and efficient matchmaking between service descriptions