Declan O’Sullivan, Dave Lewis

Semantically Driven Service Interoperability for Pervasive Computing

Knowledge and Data Engineering Group
Department of Computer Science
Trinity College Dublin

The common vision of pervasive computing environments requires a very large range of devices and software components to interoperate seamlessly. From the assumption that these devices and associated software permeate the fabric of everyday life, a massive increase looms in the number of software developers deploying functionality into pervasive computing environments. This poses a very large interoperability problem for which solutions reliant solely on interoperability standards will not scale. An interoperability problem of a similar scale is presented by the desire for a Semantic Web supporting autonomous machine communication over the WWW. Here, solutions based on service-oriented architectures and ontologies are being actively researched, and we examine how such an approach could be used to address pervasive computing's interoperability problem. The paper outlines the potential role that semantic techniques offer in solving some key challenges, including candidate service discovery, intelligent matching, service adaptation and service composition. In particular the paper addresses the resulting requirement of semantic interoperability outlining initial results in dynamic gateway generation. In addition the paper proposes a roadmap identifying the different scenarios in which semantic techniques will contribute to the engineering and operation of pervasive computing systems.