Complex environment evolution: Challenges with semantic service infrastructures

Service infrastructures are often key for the efficient operation of complex environments, such as a large Smart Home infrastructure for a mining camp. The evolution of such service infrastructures, in response to an increased workload on the system or a changing resource allocation, is often tedious and expensive, due to weak evolvability support of its service portfolio. This underpins the need for services to be designed with high evolvability characteristics. Semantic Web technologies have been anticipated as a basis for the required Web service evolution. JSON-LD is a prominent Semantic Web technology used in combination with ontologies, developed with the Web Ontology Language (OWL), to face the evolutionary challenges. Our applied research investigates common Web service tasks, automated using above technologies. It is explained, that this enables the creation of evolutionary building blocks. These building blocks are incrementally combined here for the overall service portfolio, culminating in a model of a semantic agent which excels in its capacity to evolve. Our model is then adopted and assessed for the system infrastructure of the Smart Camp project, as a use case for an agile, complex logistic environment.