Toward Capability Specification of Internetware Entity Based on Environment Ontology

Abstract

Internetware can be formed by automated aggregation of Internetware entities in bottom-up way to satisfy user requirements. That requires Internetware entity capability specification of a high precision. Thus, semantic-based approach is more attractive. This chapter proposes to build capability specifications of Internetware entities based on environment ontology which includes full conceptualisation of the interactive environment entities of Internetware in a particular domain. Tree-like hierarchical state machine has been used to describe the stateful environment entities in which the states and the state transitions caused by external interactions of any environment entities have been explicitly captued. The assumption of this approach is the capability of an Internetware entity can be represented by the effects imposed by this entity on the environment entities. Algorithms for constructing the domain environment ontology and the matchmaking between capability descriptions of Internetware entities are presented to show how to support the automated discovery of Internetware entities. An example on On-line Education is given to illustrate this proposed approach.