Context-aware, ontology-based, service discovery

Service discovery is a process of locating, or discovering, one or more documents, that describe a particular service. Most of the current service discovery approaches perform syntactic matching, that is, they retrieve services descriptions that contain particular keywords from the user’s query. This often leads to poor discovery results, because the keywords in the query can be semantically similar but syntactically different, or syntactically similar but semantically different from the terms in a service description. Another drawback of the existing service discovery mechanisms is that the query-service matching score is calculated taking into account only the keywords from the user’s query and the terms in the service descriptions. Thus, regardless of the context of the service user and the context of the services providers, the same list of results is returned in response to a particular query. This paper presents a novel approach for service discovery that uses ontologies to capture the semantics of the user’s query, of the services and of the contextual information that is considered relevant in the matching process

SOPA - a self organizing processing and streaming architecture

This paper describes SOPA, a component framework that is an essential part of the lecture recording system E-Chalk. It envisiones a general processing and streaming architecture featuring autonomous assembly of stream processing components. The goal is to provide an easy to use framework where dynamically organized processing graphs are build out of components from various distributed sources. Based on state-of-the-art solutions for component based software development the system simplifies the implementation and the configuration of multimedia streaming applications and associated tools. It supports stream synchronization transparently while extending components are installed on the fly according to the existing requirements that may change at any time

ANIS: A Negotiated Integration of Services in Distributed Environments

International audienceThe development of highly dynamic distributed environments modifies the runtime behavior of applications. Applications tend to use services available everywhere in the environment and would like to, whenever it is possible and/or needed, integrate services offered by the local environment. In particular, if no single service can satisfy the functionality required by the application, combining existing services together should be a possibility in order to fulfill the request. In this article, we propose ANIS: A Negotiated Integration System. Our system provides a framework including a set of integration management interfaces - Integrable, Negotiable, IntegrationLifeCycle - and the tools implementing these interfaces. These tools offer different techniques of integration (local/remote composition, local/remote weaving, deployment by downloading/uploading), negotiation by contracts and the capability to manage the life cycle of the integration. A prototype based on Java platform and OSGi technology is implemented as a proof-of-concept to demonstrate the potential of ANI

Ubiquitous Computing

The aim of this book is to give a treatment of the actively developed domain of Ubiquitous computing. Originally proposed by Mark D. Weiser, the concept of Ubiquitous computing enables a real-time global sensing, context-aware informational retrieval, multi-modal interaction with the user and enhanced visualization capabilities. In effect, Ubiquitous computing environments give extremely new and futuristic abilities to look at and interact with our habitat at any time and from anywhere. In that domain, researchers are confronted with many foundational, technological and engineering issues which were not known before. Detailed cross-disciplinary coverage of these issues is really needed today for further progress and widening of application range. This book collects twelve original works of researchers from eleven countries, which are clustered into four sections: Foundations, Security and Privacy, Integration and Middleware, Practical Applications

An Ontology Based Approach Towards A Universal Description Framework for Home Networks

Current home networks typically involve two or more machines sharing network resources. The vision for the home network has grown from a simple computer network, to every day appliances embedded with network capabilities. In this environment devices and services within the home can interoperate, regardless of protocol or platform. Network clients can discover required resources by performing network discovery over component descriptions. Common approaches to this discovery process involve simple matching of keywords or attribute/value pairings. Interest emerging from the Semantic Web community has led to ontology languages being applied to network domains, providing a logical and semantically rich approach to both describing and discovering network components. In much of the existing work within this domain, developers have focused on defining new description frameworks in isolation from existing protocol frameworks and vocabularies. This work proposes an ontology-based description framework which takes the ontology approach to the next step, where existing description frameworks are in- corporated into the ontology-based framework, allowing discovery mechanisms to cover multiple existing domains. In this manner, existing protocols and networking approaches can participate in semantically-rich discovery processes. This framework also includes a system architecture developed for the purpose of reconciling existing home network solutions with the ontology-based discovery process. This work also describes an implementation of the approach and is deployed within a home-network environment. This implementation involves existing home networking frameworks, protocols and components, allowing the claims of this work to be examined and evaluated from a ‘real-world’ perspective

Enriched Semantic Service Description for Service Discovery: Bringing Context to Intentional Services

International audienceIn service-orientation, the notion of service is studied from different point of views. On the one hand, several approaches have been proposing services that are able to adapt themselves according to the context in which they are used. On the other hand, some researches have been proposing to consider user intentions when proposing business services. We believe that these two views are complementary. An intention is only meaningful when considering the context in which it emerges. Conversely, context description is only meaningful when associated with a user intention. In order to take profit of both views, we propose to extend the Ontology Web Language for services description (OWL-S). We include on it both the specification of context associated with the service and the intention that characterize it. This extended description is experimented in a semantic registry that we built for service discovery purposes. Such registry considers a matching algorithm, which exploits the extended description. Then, we present experimental results of this matching algorithm that demonstrates the advantages one may have on using the proposed descriptor. Thus, we propose a new vision of service orientation taking into account the notion of intention and context. This new vision is based on the extended semantic descriptor, which is necessary in order to enhance transparency of the system by proposing to the user the most appropriate service