Communities: Concept-based querying for mobile services

Abstract

In this paper, we consider semantic service discovery in a global computing environment. We propose creating a dynamic overlay network by grouping together semantically related services. Each such group is termed a community. Communities are organized in a global taxonomy whose nodes are related contextually. The taxonomy can be seen as an expandable, flexible and distributed semantic index over the system, which aims at improving service discovery. We present a distributed service discovery mechanism that utilizes communities for context-based service discovery. To demonstrate the viability of our approach, we have implemented an infrastructure for supporting communities as well as a prototype application that utilizes communities. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.