Enabling semantic technologies in publish and subscribe middleware

The Publish and Subscribe (pub/sub) dissemination paradigm has emerged as a popular means of disseminating time-sensitive or filtered information, usually in the form of middleware within the enterprise systems of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). Through the use of an event service, or broker, published information is disseminated only to the subscribers interested in that information. However, brokering semantically rich information, especially with resource constrained (e.g. limited memory, bandwidth, etc.) subscribers, has not yet been sufficiently explored. We present a service-oriented approach for enabling semantic technologies in pub/sub systems. We map the explicit client subscriptions to the semantic context of the published data, allowing implicit data to be disseminated to the subscriber while enforcing security policies across semantically related data. To illustrate, we show that semantic technologies not only enable semantically rich content sharing but contribute data reduction suitable for resource constrained clients and security policy enforcement capabilities.