PALLAS: A Querying Interface for Pervasive Computing using Handheld Devices

In this paper we describe PALLAS (PALm Logic-based Algebraic Search), a prototype architecture, design and implementation for a search interface on a portable digital assistant. PALLAS is part of the UbAgent, a middleware infrastructure that provides an efficient way of handling the back-end processing of Pervasive Computing: accessing information from distributed databases, computation processing, and location specific services. The goal of the PALLAS´ design is to offer the flexibility of advanced searches by exploiting the metadata and inferencing capabilities of the semantic web, whilst maintaining ease-of-use to a level such that it would be accessible to an end-user without expansive technical knowledge, much like the typical users of the world-wide web today. A prototype of PALLAS have been developed and tested for the PALM OS. The pervasive computing test bed used was the UbAgent infrastructure.