Lightweight ontology-based service discovery in mobile environments

The current ever-growing evolution of mobile technolo-gies suggests the possibility of accessing services, in an itin-erant and ubiquitous way, through many kinds of mobile devices (laptops, palmtops, cellular phones and so on). On the other hand, the highly dynamic and context-dependent requirements of services in distributed environments moti-vate and recommend the use of ontology-based techniques and tools to automatically locate services that fulfill a given user request. Our aim in this work is to propose a lightweight ontology-based approach to allow the service discovery on mobile terminals, taking into account limited user interac-tions supported by this kind of devices. In the proposed ap-proach, the user can specify the requested service in terms of expected capabilities. A semantic-enriched framework to describe services and an ontology-based discovery ap-proach where such framework is exploited are applied to find services fulfilling the user needs, combining together different kinds of comparison strategies that provide a flexi-ble and efficient matchmaking between service descriptions.