An Agent Based Semantic OSGi Service Architecture

Abstract

The OSGi Framework offers a cooperative environment for the deployment and management of services for multidisciplinary software applications, achieving interoperability between systems. But even so, its service registry lack of non-syntactic information prohibits agents making this framework available for a wider range of applications. This paper proposes an agent-based novel architecture with a semantic in-memory OSGi service registry based on OWL. It enhances the potential of OSGi with semantic data extracted from services deployed in the framework, using software agents in conjunction with Java Annotations and Java Reflection API to dynamically obtain and invoke all required information. As a result, service development and deployment in the OSGi framework will get another view, avoiding the commonly used Interfaces pattern. This Architecture has been Successfully applied to a domotic environment managed by a Service Residential Gateway (SRG).