Ontology based service modeling for composability ... - CiteSeerX

Ontology based service modeling
for composability - WP3, task 3.1
Ontologies enable computational entities and
services to have a common set of concepts and
vocabularies to be able to interact with each
other.
Jarmo Kalaoja, Julia Kantorovitch (VTT)
Ioanna Roussaki, Ioannis Papaioannou, Dimitris Tsesmetzis,
Miltiades Anagnostou (ICCS)
José María Miranda, Álvaro Ramos (TID)
Jorge Parra (Ikerlan)
Fano Ramparany (FT)
identified, have been further elaborated. Moreover the modularization
principles have been introduced, which allow to integrate the already
existing ontologies and to extend them with new concepts and
vocabularies. The architecture of the developed vocabulary ontologies
is presented in Fig.1.
Contact: Julia Kantorovitch@vtt.fi
Abstract
In Amigo we use the semantic ontology based language to describe the
functionality provided by services. In order to allow a rich
representation of services and thus facilitate efficient service discovery
and composition, functional capabilities, inputs, outputs and nonfunctional
attributes of the services are further semantically annotated
using external vocabulary ontologies. Such vocabulary ontologies
including the semantic model of the house are the primary concern of
task 3.1. Moreover, as the ontology can be quite complex, the service
engineering using the semantic knowledge base and available semantic
service description languages can be time- and effort-consuming
process. Consequently, in this task we are also looking for the tools
that can support service developers on home environment service
modelling.
Keywords
Semantic service modeling, ontologies, service developer support.
Introduction (objectives)
Service modeling in Amigo is based on the definition of various
ontologies for the abstract specification of generic and domain-specific
services, including intelligent user services (i.e., context management,
user modeling and profiling, etc.) and the abstraction of services that
are provided by hardware devices coming from the four functional
application domains. These high-level descriptions are exploited by the
middleware through the semantic service discovery infrastructure to
achieve effective and dynamic integration of heterogeneous services.
The description of the work
The intensive user research [1] performed in the project gave us some
ideas on how the home system could interact with people in a service
rich home environment. Based on this research the requirements for
various domain ontologies and vocabularies to cope with the
heterogeneity of services descriptions (i.e. capabilities, inputs, outputs,
non-functional parameters) have been analysed [2][3]. The taxonomies
Fig.1 The architecture of service description vocabulary ontologies
The semantic modelling of such a multi-service environment like Amigo
home is not an easy task. The ontologies are quit complex. Different
types of ontologies developed in the project (see Fig. 1) have to be
processed and comprehended to semantically model the desired house
environment. In consequence, the service engineering using the
semantic knowledge base and available semantic service description
languages can be time- and effort-consuming process. We address
this complexity developing the ontology visualization and environment
modelling tool - VantagePoint (see Fig.2, Fig.3). It enables service
developers to create the semantic model of the real-life physical
environment without any particular knowledge on ontology or semantic
language used to describe the services. Moreover, it makes OWL
ontologies more concrete and above all easier to comprehend [4].
The achievements and novelty
• The integrated set of ontologies on service capabilities, QoS,
context, device classes & properties and multimedia content
describing different functional domains i.e. PC, mobile, CE, and
home automation. Such a complete set of ontologies has not
being addressed by other existing research
• The architecture of vocabulary ontologies and modularization
principles introduced support maintainability and future evolution
of concepts related to the Amigo and any other home.
• The visualization and modelling tool that provides service
developers with support on home semantic services modelling

• Multimedia content ontology. The multimedia content models will
be iteratively refined with the objective of composing services that
use multimedia content as input or output. Furthermore, the
models will be enriched by analyzing existing different models of
multimedia content concepts, such as DublinCore, MPEG, etc.,
and incorporating properties that match application requirements
related to content.
Fig.2 The components of VantagePoint tool
• Context and QoS support. The context and QoS vocabulary
ontologies will be revised and enhanced based on the
requirements of the Amigo components that will use them. These
components include the services of T4.1 (Context Management
Service), T4.2 (User Modeling & Profiling Service), T3.2 (Amigo-
Aware Services), etc. The objective here is on the one hand to
allow service providers and developers to represent the necessary
context properties and support context-aware service creation;
and on the other hand to provide to service providers the means
to represent the QoS properties of the services they offer in order
to help their customers in the service selection process.
Moreover the further work on ontology visualization and environment
modelling tool towards the dynamicity and real-time featuring will be
accomplished.
Fig.3 The isometric view of test Amigo house
Conclusion and Future work
For the next period of the project, our work will be focus mainly on the
refinement of the developed ontologies towards the application
prototype implementation and experimentation especially for the
following domains:
• Home automation. The developed classifications will be further
extended with the functional capabilities of services provided by
devices found in this domain.
References
1. Rocker C., Streitz, N., Janse., M, Portolan., N., User
Requirements for intelligent Home Environments: A Scenario
Driven Approach and Empirical Cross Cultural Study (2005).
SOCEUSAI 2005 Smart Objects & Ambient Intelligence
2. Kalaoja, J., Kantorovitch, J., Carro, S., Miranda, J.M., Ramos,
A., Parra, J.: The vocabulary ontology engineering for the
semantic modelling of home services. (2006) 8 th International
conference on Enterprise Information and Systems
3. Tsesmetzis D., Roussaki I., Papaioannou I., Anagnostou M.,
QoS awareness support in Web-Service semantics (2006).
IEEE International Conference on Internet and Web
Applications and Services, Guadeloupe, French Caribbean
4. Kalaoja J., Kantorovitch J., Piirainen T., and Niskanen I., A
support tool for the semantic ontology based service
engineering (2007). Submitted to FASE’07, 26-30 March,
Braga, Portugal
Additional Information
http://www.hitech-projects.com/euprojects/amigo