A pervasive environment for location-aware and semantic matching based information gathering

Abstract

The main motivation of this paper is to integrate the semantic matching capability into the pervasive computing environments. In this context, we have developed an environment that provides a semantic matching based information gathering capability for mobile users. An important feature of the developed environment is its domain independence. Domain independence is realized by first transferring the concepts of a specific domain's ontology in XML format from the server to the mobile device, and then parsing that XML file for dynamically creating a visual interface, using which users can enter requests. The generic design of the semantic matching engine also contributes to domain independence, since a generic matching engine can accept inputs and return outputs using concepts from any ontology. To show the effectiveness of the architecture, a case study was implemented in a campus area. In this case study, mobile users can find closest places to reside or eat something. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.