Semantic Web Meets Autonomic Ubicomp

The placement of autonomic systems’ management functionality into a ubiquitous computing environment is a difficult task due to the lack of systems’ resources and the need for ‘intelligence’ to ensure that the system is selfhealing/ organising or configuring. For such systems to adapt to changes to their current environment they need to be able to (re) configure the workflow of their services. In this paper, we propose the ANS, an autonomic middleware for ubicomp devices. We briefly describe the architecture of ANS and its autonomic behaviour. The ANS follows a service centric design and therefore lends itself to semantic service description. This paper introduces the concept of services with ancillary behaviour and illustrates the use of OWL-S to semantically describe them. Commitment is discussed as an example of ancillary behaviour which can be used to achieve self-healing at service level. We illustrate our approach with examples from the homecare scenario of a cardiac patient