SOUPA: Standard Ontology for Ubiquitous and Pervasive Applications

SOUPA: Standard Ontology for Ubiquitous and Pervasive Applications

Harry Chen, Filip Perich, 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

Copyright 2008 by CEBT

Outline

Introduction

SOUPA Project

SOUPA Overview

Related Ontologies

SOUPA Ontologies SOUPA Core

SOUPA Extension

SOUPA Applications

Conclusions

Discussion

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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SOUPA Ontologies

SOUPA SOUPA Core

SOUPA Extension

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SOUPA Core

Consists of vocabularies for expressing concepts that are associated with Person

Agent

Belief-desire-intention (BDI)

Action

Policy

Time

Space

Event

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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:actorentity 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

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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

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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

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Event activities that have both spatial and temporal

extensions

event ontology can be used to describe the occurrence of – different activities

– schedules

– sensing events

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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

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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

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SOUPA Applications

Two Prototypes Room 338 [CoBrA]

Bob’s Palmtop [MoGATU]

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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

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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?

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