An ontology-based publish/subscribe system

Expressiveness and matching efficiency are two key design goals of publish/subscribe systems. In this paper, we introduce the Semantic Web technologies into the publish/subscribe system and propose an ontology-based publish/subscribe (OPS) system. The system can make use of the semantic of events to match events with subscriptions, and can support events with complex data structure (such as graph structure). An efficient matching algorithm is proposed for the OPS system, which can match events with subscriptions in a speed much higher than conventional graph matching algorithms. Therefore, the main contribution of our work is that it greatly improves the expressiveness of the publish/subscribe system without the sacrifice of matching efficiency.