Enhancing Service Location Protocol with a OWL-based Service Description Model for Service Discovery in Pervasive Computing Networks

In pervasive computing environments a fundamental functionality to be supported is Service Discovery. This allows an entity to locate a service, either a network or a 3rd party service, or acquire parameters for network configuration dynamically. An important component of a service discovery architecture is its service description model, which has to be sufficiently powerful so as to allow users to easily find a number of services with precise features but also largely compatible with existing systems. Two goals which are often in contrast. In this paper we propose a service discovery framework including a service discovery protocol, SLP (Service Location Protocol [1],[2]), integrated with the powerful descriptive functionalities offered by OWL (Ontology Web Language [3]), a language that permits creation of service ontologies for flexible description of services. Namely, this work presents first results of the service discovery design activity which is being carried out within DAIDALOS (Designing Advanced network Interfaces for the Delivery and Administration of Location independent, Optimised personal Services [4]), a project granted in the European 6th Framework Research Programme, within the IST (Information Society and Technology) thematic area