Ontologies for mobile and pervasive computing

This tutorial by TIm Finin and Harry Chen provides an overview of the use of ontologies and semantic web languages in mobile and pervasive computing Applications. In information systems, ontologies are explicit formal specifications of a domain's concepts, objects, and relations. Ontologies provide both a model of information to be represented and a vocabulary to use in describing it. The semantic web languages RDF and OWL have been developed and standardized by the W3C to allow data and knowledge to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. While originally envisioned for use in web based application, they are also well suited for mobile and pervasive environments. We will describe the advantages and challenges of using ontologies and the semantic web languages to model and describe information and knowledge in distributed systems.