The SOUPA Ontology for Pervasive Computing

This paper describes SOUPA (Standard Ontology for Ubiquitous and Pervasive Applications) and the use of this ontology in building the Con- text Broker Architecture (CoBrA). CoBrA is a new agent architecture for supporting pervasive context-aware systems in a smart space environment. The SOUPA ontology is expressed using the Web Ontology Language OWL and includes modular component vocabularies to represent intelligent agents with associated beliefs, desire, and intentions, time, space, events, user pro- files, actions, and policies for security and privacy. Central to CoBrA is an intelligent broker agent that exploits ontologies to support knowledge sharing, context reasoning, and user privacy protection. We also describe two proto- type systems that we have developed to demonstrate the feasibility and the use of CoBrA.