Update 5/11/2009: PlaceLab ontology available.
An extension to Ontonym, describing the PlaceLab environment is now available. Just click here!
Update 28/09/2009: PI: Perceptor and Interpreter of Smart Home Data Sets
Smart homes and other pervasive systems facilitate various aspects of research including sensor technology, software technology, artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Researchers can often benefit from access to real-world data sets against which to evaluate new approaches and algorithms. Whilst more than a dozen data sets are currently publicly available, their use of heterogeneous mark-up impedes easy and widespread use. We describe PI — the Perceptor and semantic Interpreter — which offers a workbench API for the querying, re-structuring and re-purposing of a range of diverse data formats currently in use. The use of a single API reduces cognitive overload, improves access, and supports integration of generic and domain-specific information within a common framework.
The OWL implementation of PI’s conceptual models is now available, and provides the taxonomy to describe data sets, sensors, type of sensors, sensor data, diary data, activity, and domain context. Their class hierarchy refers to the following figure.
Welcome to the Ontonym ontologies!
Several years of developing software to talk to sensors and read personal profiles resulted in a lot of application specific code which requires maintenance when aspects of the data change, or technology is upgraded. We therefore set about using ontologies in an effort to standardize the representation of such data, and do provide a layer of abstraction between the data sources and applications.
We decided that currently available ontologies for the pervasive computing domain did not meet our needs. They, for example, did not cater easily for the representation of sensors and observation meta-data. In discussing our pan with colleagues, we also noticed that many run for the hills upon hearing the word “ontology”. We believe this is due to a lack of very basic usage scenarios and tutorials.
The Ontonym ontologies were created to make pervasive application and sensor development easier. We have done this by defining the concepts core to pervasive computing, namely sensing, location, people and devices. In addition, we have created ontologies describing provenance, resources, and events.
The focus of Ontonym is to make development easier. To do this, we need developers to download our ontologies, use them, and provide us with as much feedback as possible! We have tutorials which should help you get started, but if there are any issues you spot, pleas let us know. We want to make this site as useful to developers as possible.