Implementing a role based mutual assistance community with semantic service description and matching

Abstract

The population of elderly people is increasing rapidly, which becomes a predominant aspect of our society. For several reasons so significant a share of the human society is simply regarded as retired -- a word condemning the elderly to a reduced participation in all active life, regardless of their actual conditions and abilities. In previous work, we discussed how community resources can be organized in a better way. In particular we introduced a so-called mutual assistance community -- a digital ecosystem that removes any predefined and artificial distinction between care-givers and care-takers and provides a service-oriented infrastructure for intelligent matching of the supply and demand of services. According to this new paradigm all people are potentially active participants to activities defined by the people's current needs, abilities, locations, and availabilities. Moving from this conceptual view to practical implementation calls for an architecture able to match adequately demand and supply of services. This paper presents an implementation of such an architecture based on semantic service description and matching. In comparison with our previous implementation, main added values include a greater flexibility in service representation and service matching and considerable improvements in performance.