On the role of ontological semantics in routing contextual knowledge in highly distributed autonomic systems

Abstract

Much recent research has focused on applying Autonomic Computing principles to achieve constrained self-management in adaptive systems, through self-monitoring and analysis, strategy planning, and self adjustment. However, in a highly distributed system, just monitoring current operation and context is a complex and largely unsolved problem domain. This difficulty is particularly evident in the areas of network management, pervasive computing, and autonomic communications. This paper presents a model for the filtered dissemination of semantically enriched knowledge over a loosely coupled network of distributed heterogeneous autonomic agents. It also presents an implementation of such a Knowledge Delivery Network, which enables the efficient routing of distributed heterogeneous knowledge to, and only to, nodes that have expressed an interest in that knowledge for use as the operational or context information monitored in order to analyse to the system’s behaviour as part of an autonomic control loop.