Mobile Querying of Online Semantic Web Data for Context-Aware Applications

Abstract

Mobile devices are becoming increasingly multi-functional and personal, providing mobile applications with the necessary user information (e.g., preferences, personal calendar) to achieve personalization. At the same time, detection technologies (e.g., Radio Frequency IDentification, or RFID) allow mobile devices to detect nearby physical entities, and thus map the user’s environment. By exploiting existing online data sources about these detected entities, mobile applications can further improve personalization by including knowledge on the mobile user’s physical environment. Semantic Web sources are useful in this respect, as they are machine-readable and facilitate integration with other sources. SCOUT, developed by the authors, is a mobile application framework that supports the linking of physical entities to online semantic sources, and provides applications with an integrated, query-able view on these sources and the user’s environment. In order to efficiently access this large set of distributed online semantic sources, a tailored data management approach has been developed.