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Ontology-Based Reasoning for SupportingContext-Aware Services on Autonomic Networks
J. Martín Serrano
1
; Joan Serrat
1
; John Strassner
2
1
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. C. Jordi Girona 1-3, 08034, Barcelona, Spain.{jmserrano; serrat}@tsc.upc.edu
2
Motorola Labs, 1301 East Algonquin Road, Mail Stop IL02-2240, Schaumburg, IL 60010 USA{john.strassner@motorola.com }
Abstract -
Ontology engineering has been proposed as a formalmechanism for both reducing the complexity of managing theinformation needed in network management and 
autonomic
systems and for increase the portability of the services acrosshomogeneous and heterogeneous networks
. In this paper we propose an ontology for supporting the creation, delivery and management of context-aware services and also for theintegration of the user’s context information in servicemanagement operations for heterogeneous networks. Thisontology provides formal semantics that capture concepts of context information for helping in the service management operations and also augments the information model for adding domain-specific user’s context data. Using this ontology, wehave created a “knowledge plane” that supports the reasoning needed by autonomic networks. We have studied the use of ontology autonomic elements for gathering raw context and integrating it to improve and/or enhance the user’s context representation. Finally, we provide a study and analysis for ensuring the efficient handling and dissemination of context information to overlay applications in autonomic environments for self-managing or self-configuring service operations
.
 
Keywords
-Context Information, Context-Awareness, Ontology,Ontology-based Integration, Context-Aware Systems, PervasiveComputing, Autonomic Computing, Autonomic Networks.
1.
 
Introduction
Information technology advances and the evolution incommunication services towards mobility demand theintegration of information in heterogeneous, distributedtechnologies and systems. Context-awareness plays animportant role in next generation networks andcommunications systems which, since the incorporationof the mobility concept to communications systems, haverequired the development of extensible context modelsthat enable the efficient representation for handling anddistribution of the information in the information systems.Interoperability of the information systems issynonymous with cross-layer interaction, involving boththe communication capabilities of the devices and theelementary services of the middleware environment.When we talk about information interoperability, werefer to scenarios with a mixture of technologies; thesescenarios have many systems and devices, andconsequently different techniques and mechanisms for generating and sharing information. In each one of thesescenarios, the data models that the information systemsuse are different, prohibiting the sharing and reuse of vitalinformation. Hence, the way to achieve the efficient andclear interaction between the systems is first, creating aninformation model that defines critical concepts in atechnology neutral form, and then deriving data modelsfrom this information model that support the freeexchange of knowledge [1][2]. The challenge is to promote information interoperability in the systemscombining network technologies, middleware, andInternet facilities, to create an environment where theinformation between the devices and the applications andtheir services is always available. In this sense,
Ontology
 Engineering has been proven as a formal mechanism for solving problems in meaning and understanding. Today,most proposals for context representation ignore theimportance of the relationships between context data andcommunication networks. We propose an ontology for creation, delivery and management of context-awareservices, and also for integration of user’s contextinformation in service management operations (CONAN).CONAN is inspired from the EU IST-Context projectand also is being addressing towards the research activityin the autonomic computing management area [1][3]. Thesynergy obtained between context-awareness, ontologiesand autonomic networking promotes the definition of anew, extensible, and scalable knowledge platform for theintegration of context information and services support.Our approach defines a set of dialects and/or patoisfollowing a formal lexicon defined in OWL; this can beused to support the integration of context information inservice management operations, policy-based systems andatonomic networks, as figure 1 shows. This is aninnovative aspect of our research work and part of our contributions in the information technologies (IT) area.
Figure 1.
Ontology Vocabulary for CONTEXT in Autonomic Networks
1-4244-0353-7/07/$25.00 ©2007 IEEE
 
This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the ICC 2007 proceedings.
2097
 
 This paper is organized as follow: Section 2 describesthe most important issues related to ontology-based principles. In section 3, we review ontology as a set of semantic and knowledge-based representation tools for context information; then, in section 4, we describe thedesign requirements for our ontology for the creation,delivery and management of context-aware servicessupported by autonomic networks (CONAN), and showhow the ontology can be used in autonomic elements for gathering raw context and integrating this contextinformation into a higher abstraction for managementservice operations. Section 5 presents the mostcompelling contributions on ontologies for contextmodelling using ontologies, and finally the concludingremarks are presented in Section 6.
2.
 
Ontology-Based Principles
 
O
ntology
is a formal mechanism for representation of a conceptualization in a shared domain [4].
Ontology
is adescription (like a specification of a program in a formallanguage) of the concepts and relationships that can existfor an entity or a community of entities. Put another way,
 ontology
is a systematic explanation of the existence of anentity using a formal representation..An ontology must be explicit, formal and open.Explicit means that the entities and relationships used,and the constraints on their use, are precisely andunambiguously defined in a declarative language suitablefor knowledge representation. Formal refers to the factthat the ontology should be representable in a formalgrammar. Open means that all users of an ontology willrepresent a concept using the same or equivalent set of entities and relationships.However,
ontology
is not only for knowledgerepresentation. For example, multiple researchers showmany advantages of using ontologies in the IT area, suchas for capturing, defining, sharing, and reusingknowledge, along with verifiying the correctness of knowledge and being able to reason about an event usingthe stored knowledge of the ontology.
2.1.
 
Semantic & knowledge-based representation tools
Ontology as a mechanism for helping systems torepresent knowledge has a large number of exampleapplications; the following sections represent some of themost important applications.
Ontology as a Specification Mechanism
Pragmatically, ontology defines the lexicon that alanguage uses to define the set of queries, commands, andassertions that are available. The language represents anagreement to use the shared vocabulary in a coherent andconsistent manner. Hence, the first and most basic activitythat can be done with ontologies is the definition of knowledge that can be retrieved. This includes things,objects, activities, and other entities of interest, includingevents that have occurred in the environment of thesystem. This enables sensor elements, such as agents, toall use a formal language to describe contextual data in acommon way. Not all the ontologies are built using the same structure.In fact, a number of possible languages can be used, e.g.,Ontolingua (this uses an internal language, KIF [5], and provides an integrated environment to create and manageontologies); other languages include KL-ONE, CLASSICand LOOM. The Open Knowledge Base Connectivity(OKBC) model and languages like KIF-KnowledgeInterchange Format and CL-Common Logic are examplesthat have become the bases of other ontology languages.There are also languages based on a form of logic thoughtto be especially computable known as description logics,for instance DAML+OIL.Today, the most common exemplar for a servicedefinition language is without doubt the semantic web.The huge quantity of information on the Web emphasizedthe need to have a common lexicon, which in turn raisedinterest in using ontologies. The Semantic Web gave riseto a new family of languages, including RDF and the WebOntology Language (OWL) standard. Both are integral parts of the SemanticWeb, and the latter is a W3Crecommendation. OWL comes with three variations(OWL Full, OWL DL and OWL Lite), each one with own properties that provide different levels of expressivenessfor sharing knowledge. This in turn was the basis for newvariations: OWL–Flight focused in LP (Logic programming) framework [6]; Ongoing work is proceeding on integrating rules in ontology inspired bysome OWL modelling weaknesses; the building of newlanguages on top of OWL for specific applications likeOWL–S (OWL for Webservices) is now accelerating.
Ontology as an Operational Mechanism
Ontologies are used to describe and establish semanticcommitments about a well-known domain for a set of agents with the objective that they can communicatewithout complicated translation operations into a globalgroup [7][8]. The idea of semantic commitment [4][9] is afunction that links terms of the ontology vocabulary witha conceptualization. In particular, it enables the system tocommunicate about a domain of discourse withoutnecessarily operating on a globally shared theory.Knowledge is attributed to agents who don’t need toknow where the commitments were done, just what theyare and how to use them; an agent "knows" something if itacts as if it had the information and is acting rationally toachieve its goals. Then, we can define conditions thatagents can use to operate with "actions" of the agents; thiscan be seen as a functional interface to tell the agents howto operate for sharing, reuse, verification and reasoning.Ontologies allow the exchange of information betweenapplications at the same and/or different levels of abstractions; this is an important goal, and providesoperational advantages for the user of services andapplications. The semantic commitments defined in theontologies are used to delineate in each case theknowledge that can be shared with agents that commit to
This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the ICC 2007 proceedings.
2098
 
 
the ontologies. Likewise, the ontologies provide thesemantic structures necessary to allow gathering,managing and storing efficiently the context informationin the services and applications.
3.
 
CONAN: CONTEXT Ontology SupportingCAS on Autonomic Networks
 
In this section we present the ontology for creation,delivery and management of context-aware servicessupported by autonomic networks (CONAN).
3.1.
 
Domain and Scope Definition
We build upon and extend the entity model for modelling context in context-aware services from the EUIST-CONTEXT project, using ontologies as a formalmechanism to integrate both the context information andthe policy-based services management system. Thesynergy obtained in this process results in our novelontology for integration of context information, extensibleand interoperable, for services in autonomic networks,under the umbrella of the programmable, adaptivetechnology inherent in autonomic networks.
3.2.
 
Classes and Class Hierarchy Definition
In business support systems, applications and servicesare usually organised into administrative domains. As aresult of the dynamic nature of context, and following previous research work [17], we have identified that person, place, task and object are the most fundamentalcontextual data required for representing and capturingthe notion of context in the ontology. Figure 2 shows theCONAN upper level ontology. The ontology is structuredas a set of abstract classes describing a physical or virtualobject in the service domain with attributes andrelationships.
3.3.
 
Capture
Currently, there has been an expansive use of XML indifferent stages of knowledge capture, as well as toabstractions for formalizing the knowledge. It is in thiscontext that we use the XML Language to represent thecontext information model. Using this language hasseveral advantages: a) XML is a mark-up language for documents containing structured information, but can also be used as a mechanism to exchange and store data; b)DTDs (Document Type Definition) and XSDs (XMLSchema Definition) can be used to validate the documentscreated automatically when representing the contextinformation; we have implemented a JAVA program for this as well as for creating and maintaining XMLdocuments; c) the use of XQuery to find specific contextinformation inside the XML documents that contain allthe information related to a specific entity provides powerful searching capability.We have chosen Protégé as our ontology editor. We useit to construct ontologies, customize data entry forms, andenter data. It is also a platform which can be easily usedto include graphical components (graphs, tables) and offer storage formats, such as OWL, RDF Schemas, XML andHTML, etc.
Figure 2.
CONAN Upper Ontology Representation.
3.4.
 
Coding
Currently, the biggest ontology driver is the SemanticWeb. Software tools are available to accomplish mostaspects of ontology development. While ontology editorsare useful during each step outlined above, other types of ontology building tools are also needed along the way.Development projects often involve solutions usingnumerous ontologies from external sources as well asexisting and newly developed in-house ontologies.Ontologies from any source may progress through a seriesof versions. In the end, careful management of thiscollection of heterogeneous ontologies becomes necessaryto keep track of them. Tools also help to map and link  between them, compare them, reconcile and validatethem, merge them, and convert them into other forms.Other tools can help acquire, organize, and visualize thedomain knowledge before and during the building of aformal ontology derived from or transformed into formssuch as W3C XML Schemas, database schemas, andUML, to achieve integration with associated enterpriseapplications.Our proposal is founded on the OWL OntologyLanguage. Figure 4 shows part of the OWL Ontologyrepresented in XML, as an example of the multiplecontents supported by Protégé for representing, editing,and managing ontologies. The objective of integrating andharmonising this work in XML is to create an extensiblecontext information model, augmented with ontologicaldata, that is usable by the semantic web for better supporting web services. This is part of our futureresearch.
This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the ICC 2007 proceedings.
2099
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