A context ontology for pervasive service provision

Abstract

Pervasive computing systems that strive to be minimally intrusive and exhibit inherent proactiveness and dynamic adaptability to the user preferences and environment need to be context-aware. Contextawareness provides computing environments with the ability to adapt the services or content they provide, by implicitly sensing and automatically deriving the users' needs from the context that surrounds them, making services more attentive, responsive and predictive. This paper is concerned with the development of an ambient context management system that aims to maximize the automation of the complete context knowledge lifecycle via the establishment of a flexible prototype context ontology 1 .

Ontology-based negotiation protocol and context-level agreements

“…Only a limited list of inter-class relationships were shown in this high-level ontology as was seen earlier in 2-3. A similar ontology was presented in [17] where the upper ontology defined the basic concepts of person, location, computational entity and activity. All context relationships and properties were left for the domain-specific ontologies to determine and model.…”

“…In chapter 3 we will present our method of building an OWL-based ontology that provides ontology users with an ontology that is richer in its content and extension abilities than those seen in [17] and [18]. We will also illustrate the ontology's usage in order to develop domain-specific ontologies as well as Client Profiles and Views.…”

“…Within this GSO we attempted to contain the majority of contextual concepts that could possibly exist within any context-aware environment. Therefore many of the classes that existed within [17] and [18] were imported and expanded; their hierarchical organization was reordered to allow for easier extensions within the low-level domain-specific ontologies, and an extensive list of inter-class relationships and properties was defined to ease the development of domainspecific ontologies. The GlobalOntology class represents the root from which all context classes and properties extend.…”

“…As seen in COMANTO [17] and SOCAM [18], ontologies were divided into an abstract high-level ontology and a lower domain-specific ontology. Using this concept of domain separation, our Global Skeletal Ontology can be seen as our modified version of the Upper or High-Level Ontology presented in both of these works.…”

“…In summary, the high-level ontologies proposed in [17] and [18] are unnecessarily abstract, and they do not provide ontology designers with an initial set of helpful concepts to extend for their domain-specific ontologies. The objective of our GSO is to pave the path to our proposed ontology-based context-level negotiation enforced system architecture and protocol, and to provide designers of context-aware systems with a larger set of ontology concepts, thus simplifying the task of system development.…”