A Semantic Approach for Service Matching in Pervasive Environments

Technological advancements in the past decade have caused a large increase in the number and diversity of electronic devices that have appeared in the home and office and these devices offer an increasingly heterogeneous range of services. This has introduced new challenges for the dynamic discovery of services in pervasive environments. Several discovery mechanisms currently exist such as Salutation, SLP etc. to support service discovery in the device domain. However, these approaches characterise the services either by using predefined service categories and fixed attribute value pairs. Such descriptions are inflexible and difficult to extend to new concepts and characteristics, and since these descriptions do not describe devices or services at a conceptual level, no form of inferencing can be carried out on them. Hence the matching techniques in these approaches are limited to syntactic comparisons based on attributes or interfaces. More recently with the popularity of Semantic Web technologies, there has been an increased interest in the use of ontologies for service descriptions and the application of reasoning mechanisms to support discovery and matching. In this document, we present a semantic matching framework to facilitate effective discovery of device based services in pervasive environments. This offers a ranking mechanism that will order the available services in the order of their suitability; the evaluation of the experimental results have indicated that the results correlate well with human perception.