From: Harry Chen (harry.chen@umbc.edu)
Date: 11/18/03
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello Jerry, I am currently using OWL to define spatial and temporal ontologies for supporting pervasive context-aware systems (e.g., smart meeting scenarios). In my system, Context Broker Architecture (CoBrA), the spatial ontology consists of symbolic representation of spatial concepts and relations (e.g., regions, buildings, rooms). At present, my ontology adopts a subset of the spatial concepts from the OpenCyc ontology and the Region Connection Calculus (RCC). It also includes a simple ontology based on the Part-Whole relations. Based on this ontology, we are currently prototyping a smart meeting room system to detect and reason about meeting participants' location context (i.e., spatial properties described with temporal attributes) using FIPA/Jade, Jena and Jess. A part of my research objective is to use spatial ontologies to support user privacy protection in a smart meeting room system. For example, using policy rules, a user specifies the granularity of his location information that can be publicly shared. Knowing his current location information (i.e., a set of facts that can be deduced using spatial ontologies or other means of inferences), systems can reason about which subset of this information is allowed to be publicly shared and which subset should be kept secrete from the public. My ontology and a number of other spatial ontologies that I have surveyed (e.g., OpenCyc and RCC) mainly provide constructs for modeling space using symbolic representation. I believe an important next step in building standard spatial ontology should include representation of space using geometric systems (e.g., GIS). It would be even better if the resulting ontology is an integrated version of the symbolic and geometric systems. A practical use of this ontology is the following: knowing a person who is attending some meeting in RM 300 in the ITE building on the UMBC campus, given his policy "only share my location information that has granularity greater 1 mile", the system can infer his location information that can be publicly shared includes "he is located on the UMBC campus", but does not include "he is located in the ITE building" or "he is located in in RM 300". The reason is because both the ITE building and the RM 300 have geometric properties that are less than 1 mile. Here is a draft version of my spatial ontology and description of the CoBrA system. This work is done in collaboration with my PhD research advisor Prof. Tim Finin. COBRA-ONT: http://cobra.umbc.edu/ontologies.html - - See "Space Ontologies" for space ontologies - - See "UMBC Ontologies" for example use of the ontologies Context Broker Architecture (papers) http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/v2.1/project/html/id/1/ - - Harry On Monday, Nov 17, 2003, at 23:12 US/Eastern, Jerry Hobbs wrote: > The OWL-Space (formerly DAML-Space) effort has gone through a long > period of quiesence, due primarily to a lack of adequate funding here. > This problem isn't entirely solved, but here at ISI we have money that > will allow Tom Russ and me to pursue it in a serious way for the next > few months. That should at least get it well launched. > > The first order of business is to bug those people who agreed to (or > suggested they might) send out a list of their requirements. I won't > name names, since I've been the most derelict of the bunch. But we > hope to come up with an initial specification in a week or two of what > needs to be covered and the more requirements statements we have by > then the better it will be. > > It would also be good to get an updated list of spatial reasoning > resources that are available at various places, and an updated list of > similar efforts we should coordinate with. > > -- Jerry > - -- Harry Chen <> Ebiquity Research Group <> Dept. of CSEE, UMBC mailto:harry.chen@umbc.edu <> http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~hchen4 <> 8303 775C F587 8F91 673B 000A C396 A7F5 C12B D936 <> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (Darwin) iD8DBQE/ukTUw5an9cEr2TYRAgToAKD9SfBn+QZgF8H8Yu3BLE4AIybkpgCePcV8 vVcqYLJ4akzsMHqluNwTBB0= =9p8m -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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