Incorporating Active Real-Time Objects and Control Into Semantic Webs

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

As more real-world data are included in the Web, requirements to capture more meaning of the data have rapidly increased. Semantic Web has been proposed by W3C to be the next generation of web by representing the metadata using RDF (Resource Description Framework). Even though the metadata encoded in RDF have rich semantics and high potential for providing lots of intelligent features, there have not been enough efforts to utilize them in practical Web application areas. A real-time Semantic Web is modeled as an active environment that consists of a set of real-time objects each consisting of a set of attributes, functions, and active rules. A real-time object can be changed spontaneously or triggered by demands (via messages) in real-time. The semantics of such a distributed, real-time object system can be described by a formal logical foundation called Active Real-Time Semantic Web (ARTSW) that is the ordinary first order language (that is time-invariant) plus a set of time-varying constructs. The ARTSW can be used to describe the constraints on top of a real-time Semantic Web, or it can be used as a specification language that defines the semantics of a dynamic environment. The declarative ness and inference capability of formal logic are coupled with real-time distributed objects in order to enable the users to encode easily the domain knowledge into rules. Our research is aimed at providing a software engineering framework that covers specification, execution, and management of an active real-time semantic web. Because several technical subjects (i.e., real-time objects, distributed systems, logic, and Web) are involved, this research will focus on the explorative investigation of the technical soundness of the proposed framework.