Distributed reasoning for context-aware services through design of an OWL meta-model

A growing number of applications start using Semantic Web technologies. The base concept in this technology is the use of ontologies, allowing first-order logic reasoning engines to execute a number of semantic tasks, such as the validation and consistence checking of the underlying ontology. Because applications work in a distributed environment, e.g. the retrieval of sensor values, resulting in ever increasing amounts of data, there is a clear need for this reasoning process to be distributed. Additional concepts to enable this distributed reasoning are therefore needed. In this paper, we present a meta-model based on the same Semantic Technology. To facilitate distributed reasoning, an architecture supporting this meta-model has been developed as well. The paper will show that the proposed solution offers significant improvement in terms of the reasoning process response times.