Discovering Relevant Services in Pervasive Environments Using Semantics and Context

Recent advances have enabled provision and consumption of mobile services by small handheld devices. These devices have limited capability in terms of processing ability, storage space, battery life, network connectivity and bandwidth, which presents new challenges for service discovery architectures. As a result, there is an increased imperative to provide service requesters with services which are the most relevant to their needs, to mitigate wastage of precious device capacity and bandwidth. Service semantics must be captured to match services with requests, on meaning not syntax. Furthermore, requester and service context must be utilized during the discovery process. Thus, there is a need for a service discovery model that brings together ‘semantics’ and ‘context’. We present a case for bringing together semantics and context for pervasive service discovery by illustrating improved levels of precision and recall, or in other words increased relevance. We also present our model for integrating semantics and context for pervasive service discovery.