Mobile Services and Ontologies (MoSO 2006)

Theme of the workshop | General Overview | Topics | Invited Speakers | Venue |

Theme of the workshop

The theme of the workshop is the intersection of three major trends in today’s computing:

The proposed workshop investigates how mobile computing can benefit from service-orientation and ontologies and vice verso. The vision is to extend the typically rather limited capabilities of mobile devices by using services offered by other devices, network providers or third parties. Adding ontologies to this scenario allows this extension to be transparent to the human user.

General Overview

Today, computers are changing from big, grey, and noisy things on our desks to small, portable, and evernetworked devices most of us are carrying around. This new form of mobility imposes a shift in how we view computers and the way we work with them. In developing countries like India and China ‘Mobile Internet’ can become the only Internet a large portion of population will get access to.

Services offer the possibility to overcome the limitations of individual mobile devices by making functionality offered by others available to them on an “as-needed” basis. Thus, using the service-oriented computing paradigm in mobile environments will considerably enlarge the variety of accessible applications and will enable new business opportunities in the mobile space by delivering integrated functionalities across wireless networks. Network hosted mobile services will allow mobile operators and third party mobile services provider to extend their businesses by making their network services available to a broader audience (e.g. developers, service providers, etc.); device hosted service will allow great potential for big innovations for applications and services that can be provided by individual mobile device owners.

These mobile services offer functionalities and behaviors that can be described, advertised, discovered, and composed by others. Eventually, they will be able to interoperate even though they have not been designed to work together. This type of interoperability is based on the ability to understand other services and reason about their functionalities and behaviors when necessary. In this respect, mobile services can benefit from marrying the Semantic Web, which provides the infrastructure for the extensive usage of distributed knowledge, to be deployed for modeling services and add meaning, through ontologies, enabling lightweight discovery and composition of mobile services. The ability to appropriately combine mobility and semantic grounded data sharing has generated and is continuously triggering challenging questions in several areas of computer science, engineering and networking.

This workshop aims to tackle the research problems around methods, concepts, models, languages and technologies that enable new opportunities in the mobile space through adoption, usage, and integration of mobile services and ontologies. Of particular interest are the methodologies and technologies that would allow automatic tasks to be performed with respect to mobile services and the use of ontologies in this context.

This proposed workshop aims to bring together researchers and industry attendees addressing many of these issues, and promote and foster a greater understanding of mobile service and ontologies and their potential in enabling new business opportunities in the mobile space.

Topics

- architectures for mobile internet services
- languages for describing mobile services
- discovery and matchmaking of ontology based mobile services
- adaptive selection of mobile services
- ontology management in mobile environments
- contracting and negotiation with ontology-based mobile services (service level agreements)
- approaches to composition of ontology based mobile services
- invocation, adaptive execution, monitoring, and management of mobile services
- interaction protocols and conversation models for mobile services
- ontology-based security and privacy issues in mobile services
- mobile service applications
- analysis and design approaches for mobile services
- reasoning with mobile services
- ontology-based policies for mobile services
- tools for discovery, matchmaking, selection, mediation, composition, management, and monitoring of mobile services
- mobile service development
- multi agent systems and mobile services

These topics indicate the general focus of the workshop, however, related contributions are welcome also.

Invited Speakers

Professor Riichiro Mizoguchi and Dr. Munehiko Sasajima

Presentation title: Mobile user behavior modeling for task-oriented navigation based on ontological engineering

Workshop Venue

Nara, Japan

The workshop is to be held in conjunction with The 7th International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM'06).