Ontology modeling of social roles of users in mobile computing environments

Abstract

Today, computing devices of various types with wireless interconnections are used for diverse tasks and increasingly in ad hoc manners. It is not always obvious which devices are present, reachable, and connected when users and their devices are mobile. In such mobile computing environment, the number of registered lines on the network via network operators cannot qualify a user to carry out any service due to the unpredictable service quality (SQ), dynamic user context and the device in use. To properly manage the SQ, there is need to specify the roles applicable to mobile devices to effectively utilize the constrained and shared resources for the feature-rich applications. The user’s context may change and adaptation to changing behavior, resource usage, and security settings also pose problems. This paper presents the use of semantic web approach in modeling ontology for a richer knowledge representation of users’ activities and social roles on mobile devices. The developed ontology for users’ social roles was implemented in Protégé to determine whether a mobile user with its interaction medium has a functional capability for specific social role or not. The importance on the use of context in interactive applications is shown and a proposed framework for development of context-aware applications is developed. Results revealed that the approach can effectively enhance partnership between mobile operators and content providers of next generation wireless networks for the provision of value-added mobile web services.