Mobile and ubiquitous computing refers to an emerging computing paradigm that aims at providing hardware and software means for offering
user-friendly information and communication services, anywhere and anytime. The central concept is to empower users through a digital
environment that is aware of their presence and context, able to provide personalized services to their requirements, capable of anticipating
their behaviour and responding to their presence. An essential aspect for the ubiquitous vision to become true is therefore the provisioning of
small, handheld, wireless computing devices that enable interaction between users and environments (e.g., sensors, actuators, interactive
screens, displays, etc.), and computing elements (usually hardwired) that carry out specific networking functions such as data processing,
storage and routing. These devices offer functionalities that can be described, advertised and discovered by others and they are eventually able
to interoperate even though they have not been designed to work together. This type of interoperability is based on the ability to understand
other devices and reason about their functionalities when necessary. Knowledge deployed in mobile and ubiquitous applications is therefore
pervasive, distributed, heterogeneous, and dynamic by nature. In this respect, mobile and ubiquitous applications can benefit from marrying the
Semantic Web, which provides the infrastructure for the extensive usage of distributed knowledge, to be deployed for modelling devices
functionalities and add meaning (through ontologies), enabling lightweight discovery and composition of device functionalities (using
annotations and reasoning for service matchmaking), and coordination of processes (using negotiation strategies). The ability to appropriately
combine ubiquity and semantic grounded data sharing has generated and is continuously triggering challenging questions in several areas of
computer science, engineering and networking.
The workshop on Semantic Web technology for mobile and ubiquitous applications aims to gather input covering the above mentioned challenges, and
it is intended as a lively forum of discussion for bringing together and fostering the interaction of practitioners and researchers coming from
the many disciplines contributing to the design and deployment of mobile and ubiquitous applications in a semantic-grounded perspective.
For more information the conference chairs can be contacted at chair@swuma.org.
Topics of Interest Include
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