A Semantic Approach for Description and Ranked Matching of Services in Pervasive Environments

Abstract: With the recent developments in technology, new and diverse devices are being introduced into the pervasive world. This has raised new challenges for the discovery of devices and their services in dynamic environments. The existing ap-proaches such as Jini [AOSJ99], UPnP [UPnP06], etc., describe services at a syntactic level and the matching mechanisms in these approaches are limited to syntactic com-parisons based on attributes or interfaces. In order to overcome the limitations of these approaches, there has been an increasing interest in the use of Semantic Web tech-nologies to support the description and matching of services. This paper proposes a semantic matching framework to facilitate effective discovery of device based services in pervasive environments. This offers a ranking mechanism that will order the avail-able services in the order of their suitability; the evaluation of the experimental results have indicated that the results correlate well with human perception.