Adaptive Semantic Middleware for Mobile Environments

Context-awareness is considered a key driving principle for the design and provisioning of adaptable perva- sive services. Rightfully describing and interpreting context, however, is a challenging issue. Semantic technologies are emerging as effective means to describe and reason about context information and to allow unknown entities to have a common understanding of context. However, the exploita- tion of semantic technologies for the design/deployment of context-aware applications in pervasive environments replete with heterogeneous devices requires to address several issues. In particular, a crucial aspect is how to support semantic- based service provisioning to mobile devices with limited capabilities. Novel solutions are required to transparently and dynamically adapt semantic-based service provisioning to the properties of different access devices. The paper proposes a middleware-level solution approach that exploits the visibility of two kinds of metadata (profiles and policies) to support the configurability of the semantic support functionalities depending on user/device properties, and that offers a wide set of mechanisms for making viable semantic- based service provisioning even to resource-constrained portable devices.