Ontological Engineering in Pervasive Computing Environments

Abstract

Pervasive computing is a broad and compelling research topic in computer science that focuses on the applications of technology to assist users in everyday life situations. It seeks to provide proactive and self-tuning environments and devices to seamlessly augment a person’s knowledge and decision making ability, while requiring as little direct user interaction as possible. Its vision is the creation of an environment saturated with seamlessly integrated devices with computing and communication capabilities. The realisation of this vision requires that a very large number of devices and software components interoperate seamlessly. As these devices and the associated software will pervade everyday life, an increasing number of software and hardware providers will deploy functionality in pervasive computing environments (PCE). That poses a very important interoperability issue, as it cannot be assumed that the various hardware and software components share common communication and data schemes. We argue that the use of Semantic Web technologies, namely the ontologies, present a intriguing way of resolving such issues and, therefore, their application in the deployment of PCE is a highly important research issue.