Specifying ubiquitous systems through the algebra of contextualized ontologies

Abstract

AbstractIn order to be able to specify and design ubiquitous applications, it is necessary to rely on a precise and formal representation of context. Aiming at reducing the gap between the formal specification and the design of a concrete ubiquitous application, we have proposed an approach to specify a context-aware system at three levels of abstraction. This specification uses the Algebra of Contextualized Ontologies, which is based on Category Theory and takes contextualization as a basic notion, proposing a small set of simple and powerful operations to compose and decompose contextualized ontologies. In this paper, we present a revised version of the algebra and algorithms to compute the algebraic operations. We exemplify our approach along with a concrete ubiquitous computing scenario. Moreover, by taking advantage of Category Theory foundations, we show that it is possible to derive the algorithms for each algebraic operation from simple modifications of a single basic algorithm.