Reconciling context, observations and sensors in ontologies for pervasive computing

Abstract

There have been several ontologies developed for context-aware systems and frameworks based on semantic reasoning. In parallel, efforts have been made towards the realisation of ontologies for sensors and observations. While the main inputs of context-aware systems are observations provided by sensors, context ontologies focus only on expressing context data and do not consider the way and in which form this data is retrieved. In this paper, we review dedicated ontologies in the state of the art and bridge this gap by presenting a unifying generic context ontology centred on the concept of entity, together with an integrated sensor and observation ontology linking existing advanced ontologies. © 2011 IEEE.