Type-Based Service Ontology, Service Description in Pervasive Computing

Service description is the base of service discovery in pervasive computing environment. It should be able to describe functional and non-functional information of services and inherent relationship between services, and provide abundant data types and powerful service matching, and apply to ubiquitous devices. Existing service description methods fail to fulfill all the needs. This paper presents a method called TSO (type-based service ontology) in order to find a solution to those problems. TSO combines ontology and type system to represent service ontology by the elements of type system. With ontology representing service semantic, all the information and inherent relationship can be described, and the semantic and reasoning matching can be provided. With type system representing ontology, the extra and complex ontology languages, which overburden resource-constraint devices, are removed, and abundant data types in type system are available. In this paper two challenges are discussed: expressing ontologies in type system and matching services in TSO.