Context-aware ubiquitous computing environments tend to be highly distributed and heterogeneous, while also featuring increased dynamism as elements, devices and middleware components join, leave and change their status. In such environments, information is derived and fused with numerous sensors and context-aware middleware components. As a result, directory and naming services, along with reasoning mechanisms, are at the heart of any non-trivial ubiquitous computing application. In this paper, we argue that semantic web technologies can deal with directory service requirements of ubiquitous computing environments, much more efficiently than the wide range of legacy mechanisms. To justify this claim, we introduce a model that could greatly facilitate the development, deployment and management of ubiquitous computing applications. This model relies on semantic web technologies (i.e., ontology management) and facilitates the integration of hardware and middleware elements in the scope of a ubiquitous computing application. Using this model and its underlying ontology management schemes, we implemented proof-of-concept applications in the scope of a smart space comprising numerous sensors, actuators and middleware components. Based on the implementation experience, we outline the merits of using semantic web technologies in ubiquitous context-aware computing and smart spaces.
Recently, several standards have emerged for ontology markup languages that can be used to formaHze all kinds of knowledge. However, there are no widely accepted standards yet that define APIs to manage ontological data. Processing ontological information still suffers from the heterogeneity imposed by the plethora of available ontology management systems. Moreover, ubiquitous computing environments usually comprise software components written in a variety of different programming languages, which makes it even more difficult to establish a common ontology management API with programming language agnostic semantics. We implemented an ontological Knowledge Base Server, which can expose the functionality of arbitrary off-the-shelf ontology management systems via a formally specified and well defined API. A case study was carried out in order to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach to use an ontological Knowledge Base Server as a registry for ubiquitous computing systems.With the recent emergence of Semantic Web technologies like RDF(S) [1], DAML+OIL [2], and their common Description Logics (DL) [3] based successor OWL [4] numerous ontologies have been developed to conceptualize a plethora of domains of discourse [5]. This paper introduces an approach to model a ubiquitous Please use the following format when citing this chapter:
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