Building Ambient Services atop Semantically Enriched Open Object Information

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1 Building Ambient Services atop Semantically Enriched Open Object Information Christian Schmitt 1, Kai Fischbach 1, Detlef Schoder 1 1 University of Cologne, Department of Information Systems and Information Management, Köln, Germany {schmitt, fischbach, schoder}@wim.uni-koeln.de Abstract. The position paper at hand points out how to use semantic technologies enabling the development of ambient services. Therefore a 4- layered approach that integrates so-called object information with additional available information from external resources is introduced. The proposed approach is exemplified by the description of an innovative service called the Federative Library. The Federative Library represents a library without the need for either a centralized administration or a centralized pool of books. Keywords: Ambient Intelligence, Semantic Web, Federative Library. 1 Introduction Being on the road from Electronic Business to Ubiquitous Computing [1], Pervasive Computing [2] or Ambient Intelligence [3], comprehensive opportunities to implement innovative ambient services are to be expected. The connection of the real with the virtual world by embedding computers or smallest processors, memory chips and sensors into the environment and into physical objects [4], as well as using natural, multimodal user interaction [5] influences future business services to a large extend [6], [7], [8], [9]. Thinking about a combination of mobile smart objects and local ambient environments hosted by different service providers, a common understanding of the semantics of the information gathered in someone s context is essential to their recombination with additional available information and therefore to the creation of innovative ambient applications and services. To encourage this recombination we propose to ensure arbitrary access to semantically enriched object information. Enriching and granting arbitrary access to information about virtual and physical objects asks for the use of semantic technologies at several successive steps. 2 Using Semantic Technologies to Build Ambient Services The present position paper introduces a 4-layered bottom-up approach that will foster the development of new and innovative knowledge intensive ambient services by integrating so-called object information with additional available information from external resources (see Fig. 1).

service called the Federative Library. The Federative Library represents a library without the need for a pool of books hosted at a centralized location.

2 2 Christian Schmitt1, Kai Fischbach1, Detlef Schoder1 Fig. 1. Using Semantic Technologies to build Ambient Services like the Federative Library In particular, the potential of the proposed approach is exemplified through the description of an innovative ambient service called the Federative Library. The Federative Library represents a library without the need for a pool of books hosted at a centralized location. Instead, the books are distributed over the participants offices, and the owners decide about the book s availability on their own. In addition, overhead is minimized due to the ubiquitous integration of administrative processes in the daily workflow of the research assistants. Therefore, the Federative Library can track books and allocate them automatically to the current borrower. Thus, a researcher can borrow books by fetching them right from a colleague s shelf, taking them to his own office and place them on his table. In order to return a book, the researcher just has to put it back onto his own bookshelf.

3 Building Ambient Services atop Semantically Enriched Open Object Information Ubiquitous Information Gathering Connecting the real with the virtual world means embedding of computers or smallest processors, memory chips and sensors into physical objects, named Smart Objects. Other examples are sensor networks: Smallest sensors, which are implemented into the environment, forming ad-hoc networks in order to recognize e.g. the whereabouts, the speed, size and form of objects and to observe them over a period of time [10]. This ubiquitously gathered sensor data has to be formed into usable incidents and statements by appropriate filter and aggregation procedures. Numerous projects for the development of middleware for ambient environment have already started (see for an overview of selected projects [11]). Therefore, we have to evaluate these projects in our further research in order to find a suitable RFID middleware for the realization of an ambient service that is applied to the Federative Library. In the ambient environment of the Federative Library the doors of office rooms and bookshelves are equipped with RFID readers, and books will be tagged with RFID labels. Besides using appropriate RFID middleware to filter multiple detections of one book at the same reader, detections of the current location have to be combined with former reads in order to generate corresponding events for further processing. 2.2 Semantically Enriched Object Information It has to be taken into account that the information content of sensor data or even corresponding events by oneself is rather small. Hence, it has to be enriched by semantic annotations and integrated with additional available semantically enriched information from external resources to so-called object information. Semantic Web [12] standards like Topic Maps [13], [14], [15] or RDF(S)/OWL [16], [17] can be employed for the semantic markup of the sensor data. Topic Maps are likely to be the indicated choice in the further development of the Federative Library, since OWL capabilities are not the focus, and RDF can be derived from Topic Maps [18], [19]. However, it has to be taken into account that sensor data should be combined with additional external information to semantically enriched object information. Therefore a number of semantic web services [20], [21] and Smart Agents [22], [23] are developing by now. Thus, we have to evaluate in our further research whether these approaches would be feasible as well in order to integrate services like Amazon s Web Service [24] and semantically annotated resources produced by Semblogging [25] that may be useful for the development of the Federative Library. 2.3 Publicly Accessible Object Information In order to build ambient services the gathered object information must be accessible even if no continuous connection can be ensured for smart objects due to their mobility. Furthermore, the great amount of smart objects has to be taken into account as well as the existing energy and capacity limitations of the embedded computers and sensors. These prerequisites suggest the implementation of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks to save accompanying virtual data objects and to process information on

4 4 Christian Schmitt1, Kai Fischbach1, Detlef Schoder1 additional network nodes, which have sufficient memory capacity and computer power. P2P networks offer a better scalability, a self-organized and decentralized coordination of unused or limited resources, a higher fault tolerance as well as a better support of spontaneous networking of entities in comparison with the alternative client/server architecture [26], [27], [28], [29]. However, using P2P networks for storing semantically enriched object information requires their extension with semantic retrieval services. On the one hand, scientific research pursues scheme based approaches and, on the other hand, ontologies or P2P Semantic Web Services are applied (see for an overview of selected projects [30]). Thereof starting, it is necessary to evaluate further a suitable approach. 2.4 Ambient Services atop Open Object Information Granting arbitrary access to stored semantically enriched object information enables various developers with different perceptions to search relevant object information, combine those freely and hence create innovative, ambient services. For instance, an ambient service called the Federative Library can be developed by aggregating tracking and additional information about the books as well as information about the owner of each office. The necessary search-client can be integrated in a reference information manager in order to integrate semantic retrieval of books to the daily work of a research assistant. During that natural interaction with the Federative Library as described before, the location and status of the book changes according to the ubiquitously gathered events occurring while moving the books. Additionally, other value-added services will be conceivable as well. While monitoring the movements of the books it is possible to create social networks [31]. Based on communities of practice that can be detected while analyzing these resulting networks, collaborative filter services can propose colleagues as experts of certain topics derived from the books they borrow. References 1. Weiser, M.: The Computer of the 21st Century. Scientific American 265(3) (1991) Hansmann, U., Merk, M., Nicklous M., Stober, R.: Pervasive Computing Handbook. 2nd edition, Springer (2003) 3. Aarts, E., Harwig, R., Schuurmans, M.: Ambient Intelligence. In: Dennin, P. (ed.): The invisible future - the seamless integration of technology in everyday life. McGraw-Hill (2001) Gershenfeld, N.: When Things Start to Think. Henry Holt & Company (1999) 5. van Dam, A.: User Interfaces: Disappearing, Dissolving, and Evolving. Communications of the ACM, 44 (3). (2001) Fano, A., Gershman, A.: The Future of Business Services in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Communication of the ACM, 45 (12). (2002) Mattern, F.: Ubiquitous Computing: Scenarios from an informatised world. In: Axel Zerdick, A., Picot, A. Schrape, K., Burgelman, J., Silverstone, R., Feldmann, V., Wernick, C., Wolff, C. (eds.): E-Merging Media. Springer (2005)

5 Building Ambient Services atop Semantically Enriched Open Object Information 5 8. Roussos, G.: Ubiquitous Computing for Electronic Business. In: Roussos, G. (ed.): Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing. Springer (2006) 9. Fleisch, E., Tellkamp, C.: The Business Value of Ubiquitous Computing Technologies. In: Roussos, G. (ed.): Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing. Springer (2006) 10.Raghavendra, C., Sivalingam K.: Proceedings of the first ACM international workshop on wireless sensor networks and applications. ACM Press (2002) 11.Schoch, T.: Middleware für Ubiquitous-Computing-Anwendungen. In: Fleisch, E., Mattern, F. (eds.): Das Internet der Dinge. Springer (2005) 12.Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., Lassila, O.: The Semantic Web. Scientific American, Vol (2001) Garshol, L.M., Moore, G.: Topic Maps - Data Model. (2005) available at: 14.Durusau, P., Newcomb, S., Barta, R.: Topic Maps Reference Model, (2006) available at: 15.Pepper, S., Moore, G (eds.): XML Topic Maps (XTM) 1.0. (2001) 16.Brickley, D., Guha, R.V.: RDF Vocabulary Description Language 1.0: RDF Schema. (2004) 17.McGuinness, D.L., van Harmelen, F. (eds.): OWL Web Ontology Language Overview. W3C Recommendation. (2004) available at: 18.Pepper, S., Presutti, V., Vitali, F., Garshol, L.M., Gessa, N.: Guidelines for RDF/Topic Maps Interoperability. (2006) available at: 19.Pepper, S., Vitali, F., Garshol, L.M., Gessa, N., Presutti, V.: A Survey of RDF/Topic Maps Interoperability Proposals. (2006) available at: 20.Alesso, H., Smith, C.: Developing Semantic Web Services. A.K. Peters (2004) 21.Fensel, D.: Semantic web enabled web services. In: Proceedings of the International Semantic Web Conference (2002) 22.Lee, W.: An Intelligent Agent for RFID-Based Home Network System. In: Yang, L.T. et al. (eds.): EUC LNCS (2005) Konnerth, T., Hirsch, B., Albayrak, S.: JADL: An Agent Description Language for Smart Agents. In: Proceedings of Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies. (2006) 24.Levitt, J.: The Web Developer's Guide to Amazon E-Commerce Service. Lulu Press (2005) 25.Cayzer, S.: Semantic Blogging and Decentralized Knowledge Management. Communications of the ACM, 47 (12). (2004) 26.Barkai, D.: Peer-to-Peer Computing. Technologies for Sharing and Collaboration on the Net. Intel Press, Hillsboro (2001) 27.Oram, A. (ed.): Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Benefits of a Disruptive Technology. O'Reilly, Sebastopol (2001) 28.Milojicic, D., Kalogeraki, V., Lukose, R., Nagaraja, K., Pruyne, J., Richard, B., Rollins, S., Xu, Z.: Peer-to-Peer Computing. Technischer Report. HP Laboratories Palo Alto (2002) 29.Schoder, D., Fischbach, K., Schmitt, C.: Driving Resource Management with Peer-to-Peer Network., In: Subramanian, R., Goodman, B. (eds.): P2P Computing: The Evolution of a Disruptive Technology. Idea Group Inc, Hershey (2005) Staab, S. Stuckenschmidt, H. (eds.): Semantic Web and Peer-to-Peer. Springer (2006) 31.Cross, R.; Parker, A.: The Hidden Power of Social Networks, Harvard Business School Press, Boston. (2004)

A Semantic Service Oriented Architecture for Enterprise Application Integration

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