Metrics-Based Comparison of OWL and XML for Representing and Querying Cognitive Radio Capabilities

Collaborative spectrum access requires wireless devices to perform spectrum-related tasks (such as sensing) on request from other nodes. Thus, while joining the network, they need to inform neighboring devices and/or the central coordinator of their capabilities. During the operational phase, nodes may request other permissions from the the controller, like the opportunity to transmit according to the current policies and spectrum availability. To achieve such coordinated behavior, all associated devices within the network need a language for describing radio capabilities, requests, scenarios, policies, and spectrum availability. In this paper, we present a thorough comparison of the use of two candidate languages—Web Ontology Language (OWL) and eXtensible Markup Language (XML)—for such purposes. Towards this goal, we propose an evaluation method for automating quantitative comparisons with metrics such as precision, recall, device registration, and the query response time. The requests are expressed in both SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) and XML Query Language (XQuery), whereas the device capabilities are expressed in both OWL and XML. The evaluation results demonstrate the advantages of using OWL semantics to improve the quality of matching results over XML. We also discuss how the evaluation method can be applicable to other scenarios where knowledge, datasets, and queries require richer expressiveness and semantics.