An autonomous service-platform to support distributed ontology-based context-aware agents

Abstract

The use of semantic technology has recently witnessed a huge increase. One of the areas in which this technology is being used increasingly more often is that of context-aware agents. However, the use of ontologies in general and reasoning in particular can rapidly become resource intensive. Certainly if the data set, called the A-Box, used by these agents grows considerably over time. Moreover, in order to create context-aware applications, taking into account a wide range of different data sets and context parameters, agents have to be provided to expose that data. The collaboration between the agents in the system is necessary to correlate the information and augment the intelligence and added value of the context-aware agents. Therefore, there is a need to have a distributed approach by means of a service-platform, where the different agents in a context-aware environment can collaborate. The main focus of this article is on the research on the design of a service-platform for semantic ontology-based context-aware collaboration. The platform architecture to allow the collaboration and scheduling, together with the associated algorithms, will be presented. The engineering and implementation details will be highlighted. By means of detailed UML sequence diagrams, we will present the workflow and collaboration between the different modules in the platform. Additionally, supporting developments, such as the meta-ontology and our ontology generator, OTAGen, will be presented. Furthermore, we will detail how the platform can operate in an autonomous way, taking into account the changing context of the agents in the platform.