Overview: SWAPMe

The SWAPMe (Semantic Web Application Platform for Mobile Ecosystems) project will develop a new software architecture that will enable the mobile ecosystem to take maximum advantage of the power of the Semantic Web data model. In order to develop a platform that will enable devices, applications, and agents on the platform to be both context-aware (able to adapt to aspects of the userr to interact with other services, agents and users), we believe we must address three major research challenges:

• Applying the Semantic Web data model to the range of devices, services, policies and data to be available through the Mobile Ecosystem;
• Developing a software architecture that provides a declarative execution model linking the range of resources from data to service to policy through common computational abstractions;
• Eliminating the traditional rigidity of application boundaries that lock data into inflexible presentation models and putting in its place dynamically assembled user interface components that are composed based on user context and policy constraints.

The core goal of the SwapMe architecture is to create an environment enabling a wide range of developers (from 3rd party service providers to naive users)t o develop services and techniques that enable end-users to take maximum advantage of the data and services available to them in the Mobile Ecosystem and the larger information infrastructures in which they participate. Building from the Semantic Web data model, we propose a software platform composed of the following:

• New user interface techniques such as those learned from Haystack that enable easy access to various information types found on the Semantic Web without binding users to heavy-weight, inflexible applications.
• Traditional logic-based reasoners with Semantic Web query interfaces;
• Constraint solvers that will provide execution of declarative constraints and can check consistency of constraint sets at design time;
• Novel advertising, discovery, and publish/subscribe -protocols to assist agents in dynamically composing context-aware services in response to user needs;

We envision a portable device whose local environment is constantly changing and in which a user's goal has a constantly changing focus. Hence, even once all aspects of the environment are represented in the overarching Semantic Web data model, users and their agents will still have substantial challenges managing heterogeneity. This is the challenge that the SwapMe platform must meet.