Augmentation of Services with Semantic Meta-Information in the Physical Web
Allen Marshall, Xinchi He, Rose Gamble · 2018
With greater automation of everyday tasks in the near future, an increased number of cyber physical systems will provide services at dedicated locations. One technology that is well-suited for such applications is the Physical Web, where Bluetooth beacons advertise location-based services to nearby mobile devices. Augmenting the Physical Web with Semantic Web concepts yields service advertisements, in the form of RDF graphs, that can be understood by machines. The potential exists for multiple beacons from different publishers to be at the same location and provide related datasets to offer a richer and more customizable service. However, the existing work considers each beacon to represent a distinct service, impeding the development of such applications. Our approach to address this challenge uses RDF graph merging coupled with inference rules provided by the beacon publisher or user. The inference rules allow for flexible and complete merging, while increasing the mobile device's ability to understand services. We illustrate how with this richer functionality, the Physical Web can be tailored to specialized circumstances. We provide a motivating example in which two distinct parties want to provide cooperative services associated with a single cyber physical system.