The semantic web in an SMS

Abstract

Many ICT applications and services, including those from the Semantic Web, rely on the Web for the exchange of data. This includes expensive server and network infrastructures. Most rural areas of developing countries are not reached by the Web and its possibilities, while at the same time the ability to share knowledge has been identified as a key enabler for development. To make widespread knowledge sharing possible in these rural areas, the notion of the Web has to be downscaled based on the specific low-resource infrastructure in place. In this paper, we introduce SPARQL over SMS, a solution for Web-like exchange of RDF data over cellular networks in which HTTP is substituted by SMS. We motivate and validate this through two use cases in West Africa. We present the design and implementation of the solution, along with a data compression method that combines generic compression strategies and strategies that use Semantic Web specific features to reduce the size of RDF before it is transferred over the low-bandwidth cellular network.