This thesis discusses the influence of mobile context awareness in accessing the Web of Data from handheld devices. The work dissects this issue into two research questions: how to enable context-aware adaptation for Linked Data consumption, and how to protect access to RDF stores from context-aware devices. The thesis contribution to this first research question is PRISSMA, an RDF rendering engine that extends Fresnel with a context-aware selecting of the best presentation according to mobile context. This operation is performed by an error-tolerant subgraph matching algorithm based on the notion of graph edit distance. The algorithm takes into account the discrepancies between context descriptions and the sensed context, supports heterogeneous context dimensions, and runs on the client-side - to avoid disclosing sensitive context information. The second research activity presented in the thesis is the Shi3ld access control framework for Linked Data servers. Shi3ld has the advantage of being a pluggable filter for generic triple stores, with no need to modify the endpoint itself. It adopts exclusively Semantic Web languages and it does not add new policy definition languages, parsers nor validation procedures. Shi3ld provides protection up to triple level. The thesis describes both PRISSMA and Shi3ld prototypes. Test campaigns show the validity of PRISSMA results, along with memory and response time performance. The Shi3ld access control module has been tested on different triple stores, with and without SPARQL engines. Results show the impact on response time, and demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.
Context-aware access control and presentation of linked data