An Ontological Model for Resource Sharing in Pervasive Environments

Service Discovery Protocols have been developed for applications to take advantages of services shared over networks. Each protocol provides a way for applications to ask for the type of services they need. In return, applications receive information about services that could fulfill their needs. However, such protocols do not supply enough support for dynamic environments involving interaction among persons, heterogenous devices, applications and files. Unlike applications, people expect to receive customized information about their identity, role, social relations, and even contextual variables (e.g., location). Thus, to provide a computational support that satisfies users' requirements in an accurate way, up to date information about the current conditions of the environment and the entities involved in it is fundamental. In this paper, we tackle the lack of a descriptive technique for resource discovery by proposing a carefully designed ontological approach.