Modeling and Implementing Ontology-Based Publish/Subscribe Using Semantic Web Technologies

Publish/subscribe is a communication paradigm for distributed interaction. The paradigm provides decoupling in time, space, and synchronization for interacting entities and several variants of publish/subscribe exists including topic-based, subject-based, and type-based publish/subscribe. A central issue in implementing publish/subscribe-based systems is for entities to agree on a common vocabulary. To support this, we present a conceptualization and a design of a publish/subscribe system that combine and generalize many of these paradigms by using Semantic Web technology. In doing so, we extend previous work on ontology-based publish/subscribe by describing the semantics of publish/subscribe using operations on ontologies and by using common Semantic Web technology. Furthermore, we present an implementation in the context of a middleware we are designing and show that this implementation has adequate performance.