DAISy Dynamic Ambient Intelligent Systems Unit

The vision of ubiquitous computing is that the addition of computation and communication abilities to the artifacts that surround people will enable the users to set up their living spaces in a way that will serve them best minimising at the same time the required human intervention. The ontologies can help us to address some key issues of ubiquitous computing environments such as knowledge representation, semantic interoperability and service discovery. The GAS Ontology is an ontology that was developed in order to describe the semantics of the basic concepts of a ubiquitous computing environment and define their inter-relations. The basic goal of this ontology is to provide a common language for the communication and collaboration among the heterogeneous devices that constitute these environments. The GAS Ontology also supports the service discovery mechanism that a ubiquitous computing environment requires. In this paper we present the GAS Ontology as well as the design challenges that we faced and the way that we handled them. In order to select the language and the tool that we used for the development of the GAS Ontology, we designed a prototype ontology and evaluated a number of languages and tools. The ontology development tool that proved to be the most suitable from this evaluation was Protégé-2000. We also present how we use the GAS Ontology in our eGadgets project achieving semantic interoperability and service discovery. Finally, we present the GAS Ontology manager, which runs on each device, manages the device’s ontology and processes the knowledge that each device acquires over time.