An Automatically Composable OWL Reasoner for Resource Constrained Devices

Abstract

Centralized semantic sensor network systems gradually show performance degradation as the scale of the sensor network increases. Thus systems based on distributed approaches with local, autonomous management features are urgently required. In order to achieve local autonomy, it is necessary to push semantics towards the edge of the sensor network, but this is hampered by the lack of availability of lightweight ontology processing and reasoning technologies that are cognisant of the limited resources available in sensor network nodes. This paper proposes an approach to dynamically and automatically compose an ontology reasoner to provide only the level of OWL reasoning required for a given application. A design and prototype implementation are presented, with initial evaluations confirming that this approach saves memory without loss of reasoning ability, which facilitates OWL reasoning on the resource constrained devices typical in sensor networks.