A collaborative and semantic data management framework for ubiquitous computing environment

Abstract

One fundamental task to realize the envisioned ubiquitous computing paradigm is the proper management of the data generated in this environment. The special characteristics of high distribution, heterogeneity, mobility, and autonomy of the ubiquitous computing environment introduce great difficulties in data management, which cannot be easily overcome using existing solutions. We propose a collaborative and semantic data management framework that is incentive-based. The incentives encourage contribution from and foster cooperation among different devices in the environment. Devices that contribute more to the successful information accesses of other devices will gain more routing knowledge, which in turn improves the service of their own queries. We suggest using ontology-based metadata to explicitly and formally describe data semantics. Our routing scheme would redirect queries to make full use of cached data available in the environment. Experiment results show that our system can serve information accesses in the ubiquitous environment with less communication costs than other similar systems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.