Encoding Semantic Awareness in Resource-Constrained Devices

With the semantic Web relying on ontologies to establish online machine- interpretable information, the Internet is growing into a semantically aware computing paradigm that facilitates Web entities´ discovery of the knowledge and resources they need. Ambient intelligence aims to enable smart interaction beyond the Internet by embedding intelligence into our environment to unobtrusively support users´ daily activities. To accomplish these goals, ontologies and semantic awareness are crucial for better understanding a user´s context. While interest in the Semantic Web has spurred the development of large-scale semantic grid architectures, expanding the Semantic Web to the other side of the computing spectrum is a complex undertaking. The techniques and tools that support the semantic Web aren´t designed to deal with the resource-constrained devices with which people frequently interact in an ambient-intelligence environment. To counter this disadvantage, we developed a coding scheme for ontologies that embeds semantic awareness in devices with limited memory and processing capabilities, such as sensory nodes and smart phones. This scheme provides a compact representation of an ontology and is enhanced with an efficient and effective semantic-matching algorithm.