Controlling Real World Pervasive Environments

with Knowledge Bases

Atif Alvi1 , Zubair Nabi1 , David Greaves2, and Rashid Mehmood3

1
Computer Science Department, Lahore University of Management Sciences,
Pakistan
{atif.alvi,zubair.nabi}@lums.edu.pk
2
Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
david.greaves@cl.cam.ac.uk
3
School of Engineering, Swansea University, UK
r.mehmood@swansea.ac.uk

Abstract. With the ever increasing popularity of mobile devices and

the widespread deployment of different types of networks, pervasive en-
vironments have truly arrived. Although such environments are already
being utilised to provide services based on the available data, the mod-
elled domain knowledge is generally not formally verified for consistency
and applicability within and across domains. This paper presents our
knowledge-based verification and control approach and shows its need
and effectiveness. In our system model, policies in the form of rules are
authored at different levels of abstraction at different layers in the policy
hierarchy. Top level rules are written in first-order predicate logic based
on a formal ontology of the domain. Detection and resolution of feature
interactions (or conflicts) is an important task in the policy hierarchy.
Our running example is the pervasive mobile learning environment of
a university campus. Our approach is easily and equally applicable to
other pervasive environments.

Keywords: Pervasive computing, ontology, mobile learning, rule-based

control, feature interaction, knowledge base, location-based services.

1 Introduction
The vision of pervasive computing is to have a wealth of embedded processors and
applications serving user needs in an imperceptible way [1]. Computing power
is now abundantly available but a large gap still exists between user needs and
software fulfilling those needs.
Knowledge bases using ontologies are an attractive choice to model the perva-
sive environment: an ontology’s flexible structure can best represent the dynamic
environment that has changing data and relationships. In addition, the formal
basis of an ontology makes it amenable to automated reasoning. Such robust
modelling also expresses the desired functionality in a device-independent way.
In general, an ontology is used as a domain model to share, reuse, analyse and
better engineer knowledge [2]. A particularly useful benefit is the separation of

R. Setchi et al. (Eds.): KES 2010, Part IV, LNAI 6279, pp. 576–585, 2010.

c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010
 Controlling Real World Pervasive Environments with Knowledge Bases 577

Information
Systems Manager

Fig. 1. Architectural overview

domain knowledge from operational knowledge, which enables the development

of applications without requiring specialized knowledge of a particular domain.
This also promotes reuse of ontologies. Ontologies model data at a higher level
of abstraction than specific database designs [3] and can be used to export,
translate, query, and unify data across independently developed systems and
services [4]. Hence, an ontological model serves as a convenient data reflection
API for programmers while avoiding the rigid schema of databases, thus allow-
ing systems to evolve better. Pervasive domains are diverse by definition and
their requirements of interoperability and evolvability make them suitable for
modelling by ontologies.
Ontologies are made machine-processable when expressed in knowledge rep-
resentation languages with well-defined formal semantics. These include OWL
(Web Ontology Language) [5], KIF (Knowledge Interchange Format) [6] and RIF
(Rule Interchange Format) [7], among others. Adding rule axioms to the onto-
logical substrate enables a control plane: policies can then be defined by writing
rules to shape behaviour in the domain, e.g. by using SWRL (Semantic Web
Rule Language) [8]. Sets of rules can be written by experts in various subclasses
(subdomains) of the ontology of the larger domain and any potential conflicts
among these sets can be caught by supervisory rules operating at a higher level
in the ontology hierarchy. We discuss this in Section 3.2. Figure 1 depicts the
framework of our approach in which an ontological KB of the domain or perva-
sive environment is verified by a reasoner and the rules in the KB are verified by
a rule engine. An information systems manager then asserts these rules in the
pervasive domain comprising heterogenous devices and subdomains of varying
smartness.
Web-enabled portable devices are a component of pervasive infrastructure
as they are owned by the majority of population these days. Mobile learning
578 A. Alvi et al.

or m-learning [9,10] is an emerging paradigm—a type of e-learning or distance

learning—that uses mobile technologies to deliver educational content to users
who are mobile. In this paper, we take the motivating example of m-learning
in a pervasive campus environment. We focus on wireless connectivity as the
means of delivering educational material to students on campus and discuss the
various associated issues and their resolution. Moreover, when users are mobile,
knowing where they are is important for providing context-based and location-
based services, including those that enhance their learning experience. Doing so
in an imperceptible and conflict-free way is a challenge, as is the ability to write
a rule that can be implemented on a variety of disparate devices. We tackle all
of these challenges through our knowledge-based formal verification approach.
In Section 2 we describe a mobile learning enabled, wirelessly connected cam-
pus environment. In Section 3, we present our technique of defining and verifying
a rule-based policy and resolving any conflicts and illustrate through several ex-
amples. We also discuss there the implementation of policies at different levels.
We conclude in Section 4.

2 Pervasive Campus Environment

As a real world deployment example of our approach, we choose the campus
environment of the Lahore University of Management Sciences1 (LUMS), La-
hore, Pakistan. In particular, we consider the mobile learning approach enabled
through a wireless local area network (WLAN) on campus and study how having
an ontological formal approach can help enable a pervasive environment. Some
of the policies and techniques that we suggest are already implemented in high-
end WLAN controllers2, but we discuss in Section 3.3 how to implement this in
a more device-independent way. We do not discuss the particular technique to
determine location using WiFi. Tracking could be performed based on a signal
strength map or, less accurately, on the proximity to an access point (AP), or
triangulation (if several APs are in range) [11,12].
LUMS is a medium-sized university with an urban campus. The campus is
served by wired and wireless local area networks, providing intranet and Internet
services to students and staff. LUMS has two learning management systems
(LMS) or virtual learning environments (VLE), viz. Sakai and Zambeel. Sakai
(http://sakaiproject.org/) is a free and open source VLE similar to products
like Blackboard and Moodle. Zambeel is a PeopleSoft product, now owned by
OracleR
. Some of the features of these software are to allow students and faculty
to share educational material, send group emails and have discussion forums.
Additional m-learning facility is provided by Panopto (http://panopto.com/)
to host lecture videos that can be streamed and podcast.
To enable these mobile learning applications on the handheld devices and lap-
tops of students and faculty, high-speed data services, like EDGE, are available
1
http://www.lums.edu.pk/
2
E.g. Cisco
R
Wireless Location Appliance:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6386/
 Controlling Real World Pervasive Environments with Knowledge Bases 579

on mobile phone networks, and wired and Wi-Fi connectivity is provided by

the university. At LUMS, Internet services to the computing labs, offices and
hostels are via three different providers with auto-failover. This bandwidth is
shared with the WLAN. Intranet services to the computing labs, offices and
hostels are over high speed gigabit Ethernet and fibre channels. There is wire-
less connectivity in many parts of the campus, though the coverage is not com-
plete. A Cisco R
WLAN controller and various Cisco R
access points are deployed.
The main academic block (housing many departments and lecture halls), cafe-
teria, administration block, and the Rausing executive training centre are all
covered.
The current bandwidth allocation policy on LUMS campus gives the highest
share of the bandwidth to faculty, followed by staff and students in the ratio
2 : 1.5 : 1, respectively. This policy is enforced uniformly throughout campus.
We can think of situations where this policy might be relaxed to improve overall
service. For example, when a faculty member is in the cafeteria or in a classroom,
her allocated bandwidth can be reduced as compared to when she is in her
office or lab. A location-aware application can easily track a user and allocate
bandwidth based on the user’s current location. Similarly, it might be a good idea
to generally restrict the bandwidth of students in class to help them concentrate
on lectures.

3 Policies and Conflicts

3.1 Defining and Verifying Policies
The policies controlling m-learning services on campus are best effected through
the use of an ontological knowledge base that stores the various entities, their
attributes and relationships. We can then add a rule layer atop it that defines
the behaviour of the system. We now describe one such system that we have
previously used in an automated home environment [13]. It uses an ontology
editor for expressing ontologies in OWL with a facility to write rules in SWRL.
Both the ontology and the rules are verified by their own reasoners.
SWRL [8] was developed as a rule language for the semantic web that could
be processed by different reasoning engines [14,15]. Declarative rules give the
administrators means for regulating system behaviour, appropriate for many
forms of specification. Rule engines vary in their performance and memory use
but different ontology editors provide flexibility by allowing to choose the best
rule engine for a given domain. One such ontology editor and knowledge base
framework is Protégé (http://protege.stanford.edu/).
We developed and stored the ontology of a campus environment using Protégé.
It stores all the concepts, their attributes and relationships in OWL DL, which
is a decidable fragment of OWL. Specifically, we use the term ontology to mean
a data model that is used to represent different concepts or entities in a domain
of knowledge along with their relationships. Stated mathematically, we define an
ontology O as a quadruple (C, I, P, R) where C is the set of classes or concepts
in the domain of interest, I is the set of instances or individuals of classes, P
580 A. Alvi et al.

is the set of properties or roles of classes, and R is the set of relations between
classes, e.g., isA, subClassOf, sameClass. Within a Campus domain, we can have a
class Location with an instance Courtyard that has the property hasAccessPoint.
We are mainly concerned with two reasoning tasks for our ontological
knowledge base:

– Validation: To detect any contradictions in the modelled information in the

ontology.
– Deduction: To derive implicit conclusions from the information in the ontol-
ogy, capturing the notion of logical consequence.

An accompanying ontology reasoner (e.g.RacerPro3) performs the above reason-

ing tasks. Thus, our ontology is formally verified to be consistent and captures
all the implicit relationships. We then add a higher level rule layer to this using
SWRL, as described below.
In Protégé, SWRL rules are stored as OWL individuals with their associ-
ated knowledge base. All the OWL instances and SWRL rules are automatically
mapped onto facts and rules of the underlying reasoning engine, such as Jess.4
Any new classifications or properties resulting from executing the Jess inference
engine are written back to the OWL knowledge base. System administrators can
subscribe to be notified of any changes in the rules and the knowledge base that
they deem require immediate attention. Other changes can be taken care of in
a lazy style of updating.
SWRL extends OWL axioms to include Horn-like rules.5 Thus, one can use
OWL concepts to write Horn-like rules in SWRL to reason about OWL indi-
viduals. Variables in SWRL are represented by prefixing them with a question
mark. Rule atoms can be of different forms, e.g., C(x), P(x, y), sameAs(x, y),
builtIn(r, x, ...) or differentFrom(x, y), where C is an OWL description or data
range, P is an OWL property, r is a built-in relation, and x and y are either
variables, OWL individuals, or OWL data values, as appropriate [8].
We will now compose a few rules in SWRL to define the desired behaviour
of our network. To reiterate, we use wireless connectivity as the network level
enabler of higher level mobile learning services. We begin with the rule that
assigns a certain bandwidth to a faculty member, which is assumed to be more
than that of other users.
Faculty(?f) → hasBW(?f, 2) (1)
Rule 1 assigns a maximum symbolic bandwidth of 2, out of the total available
bandwidth, to a faculty member denoted by the variable f. The bandwidth 2 only
symbolises the proportion that should be assigned to faculty. The translation of
this into actual mega bits per second is done at the lower device level.
3
Renamed ABox and Concept Expression Reasoner:
http://www.racer-systems.com/
4
Java Expert System Shell: http://www.jessrules.com/
5
A Horn clause is a disjunction of literals with at most one positive literal. Such a
clause can be written as an implication with the positive literal as the consequent.
 Controlling Real World Pervasive Environments with Knowledge Bases 581

The next rule, rule 2, restricts the bandwidth available to students while in
class to nil by assigning 0 to the hasBW relation, which denotes the currently
available bandwidth to the student.
Student(?s) ∧ ClassRoom(?c) ∧ hasLocation(?s, ?c) → hasBW(?s, 0) (2)
Next, we define a rule to assert that if several students are in a classroom and
viewing the same lecture on Panopto, they should be able to share an annotation
tool to see each other’s annotations:
Student(?s) ∧ ClassRoom(?c) ∧ hasLocation(?s, ?c)
∧ VideoLecture(?v) ∧ usingPanopto(?s, ?v) (3)
→ shareAnnotation(?s, true)
Rule 4 below is used to suggest to a user a location where higher bandwidth
is available as compared to the available bandwidth in the user’s present lo-
cation. Here, the SWRL built-in greaterThan is used to compare the available
bandwidths c and b.
User(?u) ∧ hasBW(?u, ?b) ∧ hasLocation(?u, ?x)
∧ Location(?y) ∧ hasBW(?y, ?c)
(4)
∧ swrlb : greaterThan(?c, ?b)
→ suggestLocation(?u, ?y)
This is a dynamic optimisation problem and we are working on a predictive control
methodology to inform users beforehand where congestion is likely to occur.

3.2 Resolving Feature Interaction

What if there is a conflict between two rules or requirements? Consider a scenario
where students are in a classroom. According to a previous rule (rule 2), the
students should have no bandwidth available. But what if the class needs to
have LAN and WLAN connectivity? This situation can also arise in a distance
learning scenario: virtual universities usually require that students in a particular
area gather in a university-provided facility to view some lectures together in the
presence of a supervisor. The students can be using a mobile learning application
like Panopto or Synote (http://www.synote.org/) to view and annotate the
lectures on their laptops and desktops.
This conflict between two requirements is a form of feature interaction. The
term feature interaction has its roots in the telecommunications and was coined
by Bellcore in the early 80’s [16]. In call control systems, feature interaction can
be defined as [17]:

Components enhancing a basic service are referred to as features and

incompatibility between features or the influence of one feature on the
behaviour of another is referred to as feature interaction.

We can think of a feature as a unit of functionality—a facet of behaviour—of a

system. This means that the behaviour-defining rules can represent features and
582 A. Alvi et al.

have the potential to interact in a conflicting manner. Hence, pervasive comput-

ing environments like LUMS campus certainly represent domains where feature
interaction is likely to take place. Some feature interactions are harmless but the
majority is severely damaging to system development and user expectations. It
is a major research challenge to predict, identify and resolve feature interactions.
We can resolve the conflict between rule 2 and the opposite requirement during
e-learning classes by formulating another standing rule that uses the SWRL
temporal built-in during to see if it is currently the e-learning class time:

Student(?s) ∧ ClassRoom(?c) ∧ hasLocation(?s, ?c)

∧ temporal : during(CurrentTime, eLearningTime) (5)
→ hasBW(?s, 1)
We now describe another feature interaction situation. Some students at the
university also work as TAs and RAs. The overarching rule for students, as
discussed before in rule 2, is that they would not enjoy any connectivity while
in class. A TA/RA is a student but has a dual account as a university staff
member as well and might need network access as staff when none is available
as a student. The TAs/RAs can be given this preferential treatment through the
following rule, which resolves this feature interaction:
Student(?s) ∧ Staff(?s) → hasBW(?s, 1.5) (6)
where 1.5 is the ratio of bandwidth provided to staff.
Finally, it is possible that two rules assign different values to the same property
of an entity. This is another form of feature interaction. For example, consider
rule 7 below:
User(?u) ∧ hasLocation(?u, Cafeteria) → hasBW(?u, 1.25) (7)
It defines that all users when in the cafeteria get the same bandwidth ratio 1.25.
Note that this is in conflict with rule 1 which assigned a higher bandwidth to
faculty. This rule is also in conflict with the previously assigned bandwidths in the
system (through the hasBW property) to students and staff. One disadvantage
of SWRL, like OWL, is that it works under the open world assumption, which is
closely related to monotonicity. Hence, we cannot modify or retract information
from an ontology using SWRL. This means that we can have two rules that
assign different conflicting values to the same variable. The variable will end up
having two values as it is not possible to overwrite existing knowledge [8,18]. The
way to detect this feature interaction is to make the property hasBW functional.6
Protégé has the facility to define properties so. This way, an OWL reasoner (e.g.
RacerPro) would indicate an inconsistency when run on this ontology. It would
discover hasBW for faculty having two values 2 and 1.25 and would raise a flag.
Other ontology models and rule systems have their own mechanisms to detect
such conflicts and make amends.
6
A functional property, also called a single valued property, is a property that can
have only one (unique) value y for each instance x.
 Controlling Real World Pervasive Environments with Knowledge Bases 583

Another way to resolve this feature interaction is to have priorities assigned

to rules. Rule 7 can be assigned a higher priority than rule 1 so that whenever
faculty members are in the cafeteria, they get the same bandwidth as others.
Capturing the environment in a hierarchical manner also makes it possible
for experts of a subdomain to define rules for their subdomain. For example, a
professor knows better when to allow students access to the wireless network in
class. They could be having a tutorial in class or a mentored distance learning
session. If the professor formulates some rule that is in conflict with a general
university policy (expressed as a standing rule in the ontology), then this conflict
would be detected automatically.

3.3 Policy Implementation at Different Levels

To illustrate the challenge in implementing policies across heterogenous devices
and subdomains, consider the wireless component of the m-learning pervasive
environment. As mentioned earlier, there are commercially available WLAN con-
trollers that allow policies to be defined and perform location tracking. They also
provide a standardised interface, like SOAP/XML, for third party applications to
make use of their data. But such controllers do not provide reasoning support or
a shared knowledge base of domain concepts and relationships. The aim of devel-
oping ontologies is to promote a common understanding of terms in their respec-
tive namespaces. Such development takes place at both the higher global level
for universal concepts and also at the lower domain-specific level for specialized
concepts. Ultimately, all the concepts will be covered by the overlap and shar-
ing of these different ontologies due to the fractal nature of these systems [19].
When expressed in formal languages like OWL DL and enhanced with rule lan-
guages like SWRL, the knowledge base has the added benefits of validation and
deduction and has an abstraction to define domain behaviour. This abstraction
can then be mapped to any compliant device, making the policy specification
process device-agnostic. Of course, the ontology is also available in its XML syn-
tax for doing mechanical parsing for different purposes, e.g. translation of tags
and content from English to Urdu. This also lends itself to semantic matching
algorithms. Elsewhere [20,21], we describe a device-level technique of using rule
bundles in a bytecode format for model checking of constraints, including live-
ness and safety. We have also developed data structures, algorithms, and parallel
computing methods for stochastic modelling and (probabilistic) model checking
of large scale systems using different high-level formalisms, e.g. see [22,23]. We
can use these techniques in conjunction to provide more flexible and complete
low level and high level control of large-scale pervasive domains.
The ease of defining rules in SWRL or any other rule language depends
on the level of expertise of the system administrator. This task needs to be
simplified by using a high level language or other abstraction that matches
more closely the skills of the system administrator. There is active research
interest in policy definition languages [24] and it is an open research ques-
tion how to automatically translate from a policy definition system, e.g. Pon-
der2 (http://www.ponder2.net/), to the OWL DL form.
584 A. Alvi et al.

4 Conclusions and Future Work

We have presented our formal knowledge-based approach towards depicting and

controlling pervasive environments and have demonstrated it in a mobile learning
enabled campus scenario. The benefits include semantic interoperability, reason-
ing support and resolution of conflicts. Our future work includes running quan-
titative and qualitative tests on the useability of our system. In this context,
we also plan to leverage our earlier work in e-learning [25], location based ser-
vices [26] and distributed virtualization [27]. Another research direction will be
to enable automatic policy translation from a policy definition language to the
formal ontological model.

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