An OWL/SWRL Based Diagnosis Approach in a Pervasive Middleware

Diagnosis is the most important step for achieving selfhealing of systems, which is a challenge in pervasive computing. In this paper, we present a semantic, state machinebased diagnosis approach for a web-service based middleware. We use OWL ontologies and SWRL to develop both diagnosis and monitoring rules, based on state changes and also invocation relationships. Malfunction information and its resolution are encoded in an OWL ontology as a part of a Device ontology, and can be used at run time to check how to resolve malfunction, and further to fulfill self-healing activities. SWRL rules at both device level and system level are designed and will be executed as needed. The evaluations in terms of extensibility, performance and scalability show that this approach is effective in pervasive service environment.