A Mobile Matchmaker for the Ubiquitous Semantic Web

The Semantic Web and Internet of Things visions are converging toward the so-called Semantic Web of Things (SWoT). It aims to enable smart semantic-enabled applications and services in ubiquitous contexts. Due to architectural and performance issues, it is currently impractical to use existing Semantic Web reasoners. They are resource consuming and are basically optimized for standard inference tasks on large ontologies. On the contrary, SWoT use cases generally require quick decision support through semantic matchmaking in resource-constrained environments. This paper presents Mini-ME, a novel mobile inference engine designed from the ground up for the SWoT. It supports Semantic Web technologies and implements both standard (subsumption, satisfiability, classification) and non-standard (abduction, contraction, covering) inference services for moderately expressive knowledge bases. In addition to an architectural and functional description, usage scenarios are presented and an experimental performance evaluation is provided both on a PC testbed (against other popular Semantic Web reasoners) and on a smartphone.