Ubiquitous Semantic Applications: A Systematic Literature Review

Recently practical approaches for development of ubiquitous semantic applications have made quite some progress. In particular in the area of the ubiquitous access to the semantic data the authors recently observed a large number of approaches, systems and applications being described in the literature. With this survey the authors aim to provide an overview on the rapidly emerging field of Ubiquitous Semantic Applications (UbiSA). The authors conducted a systematic literature review comprising a thorough analysis of 48 primary studies out of 172 initially retrieved papers. The authors obtained a comprehensive set of quality attributes for UbiSA together with corresponding application features suggested for their realization. The quality attributes include aspects such as mobility, usability, heterogeneity, collaboration, customizability and evolvability. The primary studies were surveyed in the light of these quality attributes and the authors performed a thorough analysis of five ubiquitous semantic applications, six frameworks for UbiSA, three UbiSA specific ontologies, five ubiquitous semantic systems and nine general approaches. The proposed quality attributes facilitate the evaluation of existing approaches and the development of novel, more effective and intuitive UbiSA.