Context-driven RDF data replication on mobile devices

With the continuously growing amount of structured data available on the Semantic Web there is an increasing desire to replicate such data to mobile devices. This enables services and applications to operate independently of the network connection quality. Traditional replication strategies cannot be properly applied to mobile systems because they do not adopt to changing user information needs, and they do not consider the technical, environmental, and infrastructural restrictions of mobile devices. Therefore, it is reasonable to consider contextual information, gathered from physical and logical sensors, in the replication process, and replicate only data that are actually needed by the user. In this paper we present a framework that uses Semantic Web technologies to build comprehensive descriptions of the user's information needs based on contextual information, and employs these descriptions to selectively replicate data from external sources. In consequence, the amount of replicated data is reduced, while a maximum share of relevant data are continuously available to be used by applications, even in situations with limited or no network connectivity.