Ontology-based Service Description and Overloading Method for Ubiquitous Computing

ABSTRACT To provide autonomous and dynamic services for users in a ubiquitous environment where heterogeneity, mobility and variability are main characteristics, an efficient service description/structuring mechanism and a service composition method are essential. Service composition can consider context in real-time and compose appropriate services. In this research, we propose a mechanism for extracting services from a specific domain and structuring them into hierarchical service ontology. Each service is described using the proposed service specification. Based on this service ontology, users can represent their goals using various abstraction levels of services, and then our service overloading method enables to invoke the most appropriate service at the execution time. Moreover, we present a method which can discovery an alternative service by referencing the service ontology, when the requested service is not available. The experimental result shows that our service ontology could improve the success probability of users’ goals and reduce service binding time compare to using just an unstructured list of services.Keywords:Service Description, Service Composition, Service Ontology, Ubiquitous Computing