Mobile Querying of Online Semantic Web Data for Context-Aware Applications

Mobile devices are increasingly multifunctional and personal, providing mobile applications with the necessary user information to achieve personalization. At the same time, detection technologies let such devices find nearby physical entities and thus map the user´s environment. By exploiting existing online Semantic Web sources about these detected entities, mobile applications can further improve personalization. SCOUT is a mobile application framework that supports linking physical entities to online semantic data sources. It provides applications with an integrated, query-able view on these sources and the user´s environment. The authors developed a tailored data management approach to efficiently access these distributed online semantic sources.