A semantic publish/subscribe system

Abstract

The publish/subscribe computing paradigm is rapidly gaining momentum due to its capability to integrate loosely coupled applications over the Internet. Existing publish/subscribe systems fall into one of three categories: topic-based, content-based and relational. They all require that the event publishers and subscribers adhere to the same organization of information (i.e., event schema), and route events based on event values only. Such systems are inadequate in heterogeneous and dynamic environments where the event providers and consumers may use different event schemas. In this paper, we present a semantic publish/subscribe system. With our system, the event providers publish events and event consumers define subscription conditions using their respective event schema of choice. Our system uses ontologies to understand the semantics of events, and correlates and maps events using relational operators as part of event brokering.