Semantic Approach to Middleware-Driven Run-Time Context-Aware Adaptation Decision

The need for a middleware layer to facilitate context-aware adaptation for applications has been widely reported and acknowledged in the research community. However, the majority of existing efforts employs an application-driven compile-time approach to supporting context-aware adaptation decisions. Such approach places a heavy burden on application developers to anticipate and formulate adaptation rules. This paper presents an ontology-based model that is used to facilitate the middleware layer with the ability to understand and reason the semantics of entities deployed on it, and to thereby enable middleware-driven run-time adaptation decisions. Through middleware-driven run-time adaptation decisions, not only will developers be freed from predicting, formulating and maintaining adaptation rules, but it will be possible to achieve an optimized quality of service by deferring the adaptation decisions until run-time to account for up-to-date contextual conditions.