ONCOR: ontology- and evidence-based context reasoner

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we describe ONCOR, our ontology- and evidence-based approach to reason about context. ONCOR tackles the critical problem of providing a flexible and pragmatic approach to building light-weight ontologies of places, devices and sensors in MyPlace, a ubiquitous computing application which provides personalised information about a building. Our contributions lie in constructing a general middle ontology for a building (MIBO) based on OpenCyc, combined with our own approach to evidence-based reasoning, (accretion and resolution). We describe the evaluation of ONCOR in terms of a comparison of its answers to core ontological questions about context with previous work.

REFERENCES

• 1: David J. Carmichael , Judy Kay , Bob Kummerfeld, Consistent Modelling of Users, Devices and Sensors in a Ubiquitous Computing Environment, User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, v.15 n.3-4, p.197-234, August 2005 [doi>10.1007/s11257-005-0001-z]
• 2: Ranganathan, A., McGrath, R.E., Campbell, R.H., Mickunas, D.: Ontologies in a pervasive computing environment. In: Workshop on Ontologies in Distributed Systems, IJCAI 2003. (2003).
• 3: Chen, H., Perich, F., Finin, T., Joshi, A.: SOUPA: Standard ontology for ubiquitous and pervasive applications. In: MOBIQUITOUS 2004. 258--267.
• 4: Xiao Hang Wang , Da Qing Zhang , Tao Gu , Hung Keng Pung, Ontology Based Context Modeling and Reasoning using OWL, Proceedings of the Second IEEE Annual Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops, p.18, March 14-17, 2004
• 5: Heckmann, D.: Ubiquitous User Modeling. PhD thesis, Department of Computer Science, Saarland University, Germany (2005).
• 6: Renato de Freitas Bulcao Neto , Maria da Graca Campos Pimentel, Toward a Domain-Independent Semantic Model for Context-Aware Computing, Proceedings of the Third Latin American Web Congress, p.61, October 31-November 02, 2005 [doi>10.1109/LAWEB.2005.43]
• 7: Alessandra Agostini , Claudio Bettini , Daniele Riboni, Experience Report: Ontological Reasoning for Context-aware Internet Services, Proceedings of the Fourth Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops, p.8, March 13-17, 2006 [doi>10.1109/PERCOMW.2006.52]
• 8: Noy, N.F., McGuinness, D.L.: Ontology development 101: A guide to creating your first ontology. Technical Report KSL-01-05, Stanford KSL (2000).
• 9: Jeff Heflin , James A. Hendler, Dynamic Ontologies on the Web, Proceedings of the Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Twelfth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, p.443-449, July 30-August 03, 2000
• 10: Ian Horrocks, DAML+OIL: A Reason-able Web Ontology Language, Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Extending Database Technology: Advances in Database Technology, p.2-13, March 25-27, 2002
• 11: J. R. G. Pulido , M. A. G. Ruiz , R. Herrera , E. Cabello , S. Legrand , D. Elliman, Ontology languages for the semantic web: A never completely updated review, Knowledge-Based Systems, v.19 n.7, p.489-497, November, 2006 [doi>10.1016/j.knosys.2006.04.013]
• 12: Douglas B. Lenat, CYC: a large-scale investment in knowledge infrastructure, Communications of the ACM, v.38 n.11, p.33-38, Nov. 1995 [doi>10.1145/219717.219745]
• 13: George A. Miller, WordNet: a lexical database for English, Communications of the ACM, v.38 n.11, p.39-41, Nov. 1995 [doi>10.1145/219717.219748]
• 14: H. Liu , P. Singh, ConceptNet — A Practical Commonsense Reasoning Tool-Kit, BT Technology Journal, v.22 n.4, p.211-226, October 2004 [doi>10.1023/B:BTTJ.0000047600.45421.6d]
• 15: Mueller, E.T.: Natural language processing with Thought-Treasure. WWW (1998) Available: http://www.signiform.com/tt/book/, 26 May 2006.
• 16: Judy Kay , Bob Kummerfeld , Piers Lauder, Personis: A Server for User Models, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems, p.203-212, May 29-31, 2002
• 17: Brank, J., Grobelnik, M., Mladenić, D.: A survey of ontology evaluation techniques. In: SIKDD 2005 at multiconference IS 2005. (2005).
• 18: Harry Chen , Tim Finin , Anupam Joshi, An ontology for context-aware pervasive computing environments, The Knowledge Engineering Review, v.18 n.3, p.197-207, September 2003 [doi>DOI:10.1017/S0269888904000025]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.4 Knowledge Representation Formalisms and Methods
          Subjects: Semantic networks

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
context-aware, evidence accretion, ontology