Ubiquitous Web for Ubiquitous Computing Environments: the Role of Embedded Semantics

Pervasive Computing enlarged the traditional computing setting into the human layer of the earth. Different devices in pervasive environments are seamlessly integrated in various ways. Examples are wired and wireless networks, infrared connections, Bluetooth etc. Apart from these local ties, pervasive computing environments are mostly connected with the World Wide Web environment as the simple most important digital information layer. In this paper we propose an approach, a conceptual upper context model and a service oriented framework for exploiting the vast amount of valuable information contained by the World Wide Web for the benefit of context-aware pervasive computing environments. Machine understandability of the web information is the key challenge for our purpose since a typical pervasive setting covers a variety of devices with different characteristics. We base our approach and models on semantic web activities, particularly on Embedded Semantics, which are of crucial importance for bringing structure into the World Wide Web. We first propose a conceptual upper context model, and then based on this model we propose a web harvesting approach and a service oriented application framework. Finally we demonstrate and evaluate our approach and models through examples which are based on specific scenarios, each representing a different perspective, and we partially realize our approach and the framework for the e-Learning domain.