SOUPA: Standard Ontology for Ubiquitous and Pervasive Applications

1. SOUPA: Standard Ontology for Ubiquitous and Pervasive Applications Harry Chen, FilipPerich, Tim Finin, Anupam Joshi Department of Computer Science & Electrical Engineering University of Maryland, Baltimore County International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems (2004. 08. 22) 2008. 10. 01. Summarized by Babar Tareen, IDS Lab., Seoul National University Presented by Babar Tareen, IDS Lab., Seoul National University

2. Outline • Introduction • SOUPA Project • SOUPA Overview • Related Ontologies • SOUPA Ontologies • SOUPA Core • SOUPA Extension • SOUPA Applications • Conclusions • Discussion

3. Introduction • To represent knowledge • No common ontologies • No explicit semantic representation • Many systems use programming language objects • Need to develop a shared ontology for supporting • Knowledge sharing • Context reasoning • Interoperability

4. SOUPA Project • Project started in November 2003 • GOAL • Define ontologies to support pervasive computing applications • No updates since 2004 • Other papers • A Pervasive Computing Ontology for User Privacy Protection in the Context Broker Architecture (Harry Chen, Tim Finin, and Anupam Joshi)July 12, 2004 • http://www.cs.umbc.edu/sw-ubicomp-sig/soupa-2004-06.html

5. SOUPA Overview • SOUPA is based on other ontologies • Borrows terms from other ontologies • FOAF, DAMIL-Time, Entry Sub-ontology of Time, OpenCyc Spatial ontologies, RCC, COBRA-ONT, MoGATU BDI Ontology, Rei Policy • Does not import complete ontologies to minimize overhead for reasoning • Borrowed ontology terms are mapped to foreign ontology terms for interoperability • owl:equivalentClass • owl:equivalentProperty

6. Related Ontologies (1) • FOAF • allows the expression of personal information and relationships • useful for building support for online communities • DAMIL-Time & Entry Sub-ontology of Time • designed for expressing temporal concepts and properties common to any formalization of time • OpenCyc Spatial Ontologies & RCC • define a comprehensive set of vocabularies for symbolic representation of space

7. Related Ontologies (2) • COBRA-ONT & MoGATU BDI Ontology • aimed for supporting knowledge representation and ontology reasoning • Rei Policy Ontology • defines a set of concepts (rights, prohibitions, obligations and dispensations) for specifying and reasoning about security access control rules.

8. SOUPA Ontologies • SOUPA • SOUPA Core • SOUPA Extension

9. SOUPA Core • Consists of vocabularies for expressing concepts that are associated with • Person • Agent • Belief-desire-intention (BDI) • Action • Policy • Time • Space • Event

10. SOUPA Core – Details (1) • Person • defines typical vocabularies for describing the contact information and the profile of a person • per:Person is equivalent to foaf:Person • Policy & Action • policy ontology defines vocabularies for representing security and privacy policies • Actions represented by act:Action class • act:actor entity that performs the action • act:recipient entity that receives the effect after the action is performed • act:target object that the action applies to • act:location location where the action is performed • act:time time at which the action is performed • Act:instrument thing that the actor uses to perform the action

11. SOUPA Core – Details (2) • Agent & BDI • agt:Agent class represents a set of all agents • agt:believes • agt:desires • agt:intends • BDI (Believe, Desire, Intention) • bdi:Fact class • bdi:Desire class • bdi:Intention class

12. SOUPA Core – Details (3) • Time • defines a set of ontologies for expressing time and temporal relations • adopts the vocabularies of the DAML-time and the entry sub-ontology of time • Space • designed to support reasoning about • spatial relations between various types of geographical regions • mapping from the geo-spatial coordinates to the symbolic representation of space and vice versa • representation of geographical measurements of space

13. SOUPA Core – Details (4) • Event • activities that have both spatial and temporal extensions • event ontology can be used to describe the occurrence of • different activities • schedules • sensing events

14. SOUPA Extension • Purpose • An extended set of vocabularies for supporting specific types of applications • Demonstrate how to extend SOUPA • Currently consists of experimental ontologies • Includes information about • Documents • Meetings • Schedule • Location • Device

15. SOUPA Extension – Details (1) • Meeting & Schedule • For describing typical information associated with meetings, event schedules, and event participants • Document & Digital Document • For describing metainformation about documents and digital documents • Image Capture • defines vocabularies for describing image capturing events (where and when a picture is taken, which device has taken the picture, etc.) • Region Connection Calculus • A spatial ontology that supplements the core space ontology • Location • For describing sensed location context of a person or an object

16. SOUPA Applications • Two Prototypes • Room 338 [CoBrA] • Bob’s Palmtop [MoGATU]

17. Conclusion • Overall experience in developing the SOUPA ontology was challenging • what is the most appropriate ontology structure • it was necessary to modify the structures and the constructs of the existing ontologies before including them into the SOUPA ontology • developing methodologies to measure the success of the SOUPA ontology was difficult

18. Discussion • How different is SOUPA from the concept of Domain Ontology and Upper Ontology ? • Why is project no longer active ? • Is SOUPA perfect ? • Or no one is using it ? • Authors have to modify existing ontologies to some extent. • Isn’t it like making a completely new ontology?