Advanced Resource Discovery Protocol for Semantic-Enabled M-Commerce

Abstract

New mobile architectures allow for stable networked links from almost everywhere; and more and more people make use of information resources for work and business purposes on mobile systems. Although technological improvements in the standardization processes proceed rapidly; many challenges; mostly aimed at the deployment of value-added services on mobile platforms; are still unsolved. In particular the evolution of wireless-enabled handheld devices and their capillary diffusion have increased the need for more sophisticated service discovery protocols (SDPs). Here we present an approach; which improves Bluetooth SDP; to provide m-commerce resources to the users within a piconet; extending the basic service discovery with semantic capabilities. In particular we exploit and enhance the SDP in order to identify generic resources rather than only services. We have integrated a “semantic layer” within the application level of the standard Bluetooth stack in order to enable a simple interchange of semantically annotated information between a mobile client performing a query and a server exposing available resources. We adopt a simple piconet configuration where a stable networked zone server; equipped with a Bluetooth interface; collects requests from mobile clients and hosts a semantic facilitator to match requests with available resources. Both requests and resources are expressed as semantically annotated descriptions; so that a semantic distance can be computed as part of the ranking function; to choose the most promising resources for a given request.