PI: Boon Thau Loo (University of Pennsylvania) Co-PI: William C. Regli (Drexel University) Senior Personnel: Joseph B. Kopena (Drexel University)
This research investigates scalable, knowledge-based middleware supporting content-based addressing and routing in mobile, networked systems. It incorporates and integrates two aspects: Ontological reasoning about system resources and declarative networking within routing components. At the application layer is OntoNet, a knowledge-based framework for representing and reasoning on system elements. Declarative, formal techniques provide service discovery and composition, content-based messaging, and distributed querying using OWL-Net, a subset of the OWL description logic. This work includes development of propagation strategies that are efficient and robust in mobile, networked environments. Network layer support is provided by declarative networks, a rule-based framework for compact, high-level protocol specifications. Declarative networking enables rapid prototyping and verification as well as online adaptation and meta-reasoning. This research will include extension of declarative networking to more readily support highly dynamic mobile wireless systems. The intellectual merit of this proposal is development of a unified, declarative framework for distributed organization of knowledge and information in real-world systems. It draws from many areas such as the Semantic Web, databases, and networking. Potential broader impacts are richer and more extensible platforms for real-world networks usable in emergency response, logistics, infrastructure monitoring, and ubiquitous computing.
