Intelligent Agents Meet the Semantic Web in Smart Spaces

Harry Chen,Tim Finin, Anupam Joshi, and Lalana Kagal

University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Filip Perich

Cougaar Software
Dipanjan Chakraborty

IBM India Research Laboratory

IEEE INTERNET COMPUTING, NOVEMBER, OCTOBER 2004, Published by the IEEE Computer Society

2008. 04.18 Summarized by Dongjoo Lee, IDS Lab., Seoul National University Presented by Dongjoo Lee, IDS Lab., Seoul National University

Contents
EasyMeeting
Vigil

Services
Architecture

Context Broker Architecture (Cobra) COBRA-ONT Context Reasoning Privacy Protection Conclusion

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EasyMeeting
A pervasive computing system that supports users in a smart meeting-room environment in which a distributed system of intelligent agents, services, devices, and sensors share a common goal; Goal
Provide relevant services and information to meeting participants on the basis of their contexts. Provide a centralized model of context that all devices, services, and agents in the space can share Acquire contextual information from sources that are unreachable by the resource-limited devices Reason about contextual information that cant be directly acquired from the sensors

Context Broker

Detect and resolve inconsistent knowledge sotred in the shared context model
Protect privacy by enforcing policies that users have defined to control the sharing and use of their contextual information Uses OWL for expressing ontologies to
support context modeling and knowledge sharing

Differences

detect and resolve inconsistent context knowledge

protect the users privacy.

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EasyMeeting

Vigil

Specialized server entities that facilitate system communication, clientrole management, and service-access control.
Clients, services, and Vigil managers

Role-based inference mechanism to control access to services

Role-permission definition

Reasoning of the role-assignment manager is built on the Rei framework.

Deontic concept
Rights, prohibitions, obligations, and dispensations

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EasyMeeting

Services

Speech understanding
CCML (Centaurus Capability Markup Language)

IBM WebSphere Voice Server SDK, Voice XML

Presentation
AppleScript commands

Lighting control
X10 technology

Music
MP3 music player software

Greeting
Profile display
Web-based server application

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EasyMeeting -

Architecture
Presentation Schedule On 8 September 2004, 1:00 to 2:30 P.M. Room 338

In Standard Device Ontology

device profile

Harry (speaker)

(the distinguished audience)

Hrabowski

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Context Broker Architecture (Cobra)

Jena reasoning API OWL ontologies Jess rule-based engine domain specific reasoning

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COBRA-ONT
Why OWL ?
Expressive knowledge-representation language

Have a normative syntax in RDF and XML Has many predefined classes and properties
Time, space, policy, social networks, actions, location context, documents, and events

COBRA-ONT imports from SOUPA

Integrated from other ontologies

FOAF DAML-Time & the Entry Sub-ontology of Time OpenCyc Spatial Ontologies & RCC

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COBRA-ONT & MoGATU BDI Ontology

Rei Policy Ontology
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User Profile Example

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Context Reasoning
Jena rule engine ontology axioms Java Expert System Shell (JESS) forward-chaining inference Algorithm
Ontology inference
1) Jess rule execution

2)
3)

select the type of context it attempt to infer

decide whether it can infer this type of context using only ontology reasoning

Logic inference
4) Find all essential supporting facts by querying the ontology model

5)
6) 7)

Convert RDF representation into the Jess representation

Executing the predefined forward-chaining procedure Add newly deduced facts to ontology model

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Context Reasoning -

Assumption-based reasoning

Harry is in Room RM338

Harry intends to give a presentation in meetting m1203

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Privacy Protection
Users can define customized policy rules to permit or forbid access to their private information in various granularity.

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Privacy Protection -

Example
RDF Notation 3 Syntax

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Feedback from Demonstrations

From three external groups
UMBC university administrators, visitors from commercial companies and other universities

Critics
The system has a limited ability to handle unexpected situational changes The workflow process was too rigid and could be unsuitable for everyday usage Using policy to control how private information is shared doesnt address other kinds of privacy concerns such as the logging and persistent storage of a users private information by the agents, and the possibility for the agents acquiring certain private user information by reasoning over an aggregated collection of their public information.

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Conclusion
The EasyMeeting and Cobra prototypes demonstrate the feasibility of using OWL ontologies to let distributed agents

share knowledge
reason about contextual information express policies for user privacy protection

Challenging issues
Scalability of knowledge sharing in a distributed and dynamic environment Performance and time complexity of context reasoning of a vast amount of sensing data User-interface issues associated with editing and maintaining user privacy policies

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