Linked Open Data for Context-aware Services: Analysis, Classification and Context Data Discovery

The amount of data within the Linking Open Data (LOD) Cloud is steadily increasing and resembles a rich source of information. Since Context-aware Services (CAS) are based on the correlation of heterogeneous data sources for deriving the contextual situation of a target, it makes sense to leverage that enormous amount of data already present in the LOD Cloud to enhance the quality of these services. Within this work, the applicability of the LOD Cloud as a context provider for enriching CAS is investigated. For this purpose, a deep analysis according to the discoverability and availability of datasets is performed. Furthermore, in order to ease the process of finding a dataset that matches the information needs of a CAS developer, techniques for retrieving contents of LOD datasets are discussed and different approaches to condense the dataset to its most important concepts are shown. Finally, a Context Data Lookup Service is introduced that enables context data discovery within the LOD Cloud and its applicability is highlighted based on an example.