Ontology-Based Resource Discovery in Pervasive Collaborative Environments

Abstract

Most of the working environments offer multiple hardware and software that could be shared among the members of staff. However, it could be particularly difficult to take advantages of all these resources without a proper software support capable of discovering the ones that fulfill both a user’s requirements and each resource owner’s sharing preferences. To try to overcome this problem, several service discovery protocols have been developed, aiming to promote the use of network resources and to reduce configuration tasks. Unfortunately, these protocols are mainly focused on finding resources based just on their type or some minimal features, lacking information about: user preferences, restrictions and contextual variables. To outstrip this deficiency, we propose to exploit the power of semantic description, by creating a knowledge base integrated by a set of ontologies generically designed to be adopted by any type of organization. To validate this proposal, we have customized the ontologies for our case of study, which is a research center.