The SOUPA Ontology for Pervasive Computing

Abstract

This paper describes SOUPA (Standard Ontology for Ubiquitous and Pervasive Applications) and the use of this ontology in building the Context Broker Architecture (CoBrA). CoBrA is a new agent architecture for supporting pervasive context-aware systems in a smart space environment. The SOUPA ontology is expressed using the Web Ontology Language OWL and includes modular component vocabularies to represent intelligent agents with associated beliefs, desire, and intentions, time, space, events, user profiles, actions, and policies for security and privacy. Central to CoBrA is an intelligent broker agent that exploits ontologies to support knowledge sharing, context reasoning, and user privacy protection. We also describe two prototype systems that we have developed to demonstrate the feasibility and the use of CoBrA.