An Ontology for Context-Aware Pervasive Computing Environments

Ontologies are a key component for building open and dynamic distributed pervasive computing systems in which agents and devices share contextual information. We describe our use of the Web Ontology Language OWL and other tools for building the foundation ontology for the Context Broker Architecture (CoBrA), a new context-aware pervasive computing framework. The current version of the CoBrA ontology models the basic concepts of people, agents, places, and presentation events in an intelligent meeting room environment. It provides a vocabulary of terms for classes and properties suitable for building practical systems that model context in pervasive computing environments. We also describe our ongoing research in developing an OWL inference engine using Flora-2 and in extending the present CoBrA ontology to use the DAML spatial and temporal ontologies.