Ontology-enabled generation of embedded web services

Abstract

Web services are increasingly adopted as a service provision mechanism in pervasive computing environments. Implementing web services on networked, embedded devices raises a number of challenges, for example efficiency of web services, handling of variability and dependencies of hardware and software platforms, and of device state and context changes. To address these challenges, we developed a web service compiler, Limbo, in which Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontologies are used to make the Limbo compiler aware of its compilation context, such as targeted hardware and software. At the same time, knowledge on device details, platform dependencies, and resource/power consumption is built into the supporting ontologies, which are used to configure Limbo for generating resource efficient web service code. A state machine ontology is used to generate stub code to facilitate handling of state changes of a device. A number of evaluations show that the design of the Limbo compiler is successful in terms of performance of the generated web service, completeness in being applicable to a variety of embedded devices, and usability for developers in creating new services.