A Service Oriented Architecture Combining Agents and Ontologies Towards Pervasive Adaptation

Contemporary software technologies complying with the ServiceOriented Architectural (SOA) paradigm, such as OSGi, UPnP, and the Web services do not meet on their own the adaptability and interoperability challenges of the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environments. In this paper we present a solution based on the combination of the SOA model with Agents and Ontologies. The agent approach complements the SOA infrastructure by providing high level adaptation to user’s tasks, as an intelligent control layer above SOA. Ontologies are used to tackle the semantic heterogeneity that arises in AmI spaces and provide to agents a common repository of system knowledge, policies and state.