Matching dynamic demands of mobile users with dynamic service offers

This chapter describes the use of ontologies for personalized situation-aware information and service supply of mobile users in different application domains. A modular application ontology, composed of upper-level ontologies, such as location and time ontologies and of domain-specific ontologies, acts as a semantic reference model for a compatible description of user demands and service offers in a service-oriented information-logistical platform. The authors point out that the practical deployment of the platform proved the viability of the conceptual approach and exhibited the need for a more performant implementation of inference engines in mobile multi-user scenarios. Furthermore, the authors hope that understanding the underlying concepts and domain-specific application constraints will help researchers and practitioners building more sophisticated applications not only in the domains tackled in this chapter but also transferring the concepts to other domains.