Towards an Upper Ontology and Hybrid Ontology Matching for Pervasive Environments

Abstract

Pervasive environments include sensors, actuators, handheld devices, set of protocols and services. The specialty of this environment is its power to manage with any device at any time anywhere and work autonomously for providing customized services to user. The different entities of pervasive environment collaborate with each other to accomplish an objective by sharing data among them. It raises an interesting problem called semantic heterogeneity. To address this problem, a hybrid ontology matching technique which combines direct and indirect matching techniques is proposed in this paper. To share and integrate data semantically, ontology matching technique establishes a semantic correspondence among various entities of pervasive application ontologies. To find the efficiency of proposed approach, we carried out set of experiments with real world pervasive applications. Experimental results prove that the proposed approach shows excellent performance in hybrid ontology matching. Results also proved that the use of background knowledge has influence over the performance of ontology matching technique.