This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts

for publication in the ICC 2007 proceedings.

Ontology-Based Reasoning for Supporting

Context-Aware Services on Autonomic Networks
J. Martín Serrano1; Joan Serrat1; John Strassner2
1
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. C. Jordi Girona 1-3, 08034, Barcelona, Spain.
{jmserrano; serrat}@tsc.upc.edu
2
Motorola Labs, 1301 East Algonquin Road, Mail Stop IL02-2240, Schaumburg, IL 60010 USA
{john.strassner@motorola.com }

clear interaction between the systems is first, creating an

Abstract - Ontology engineering has been proposed as a formal
mechanism for both reducing the complexity of managing the
information needed in network management and autonomic
systems and for increase the portability of the services across
homogeneous and heterogeneous networks. In this paper we
propose an ontology for supporting the creation, delivery and
management of context-aware services and also for the
integration of the user’s context information in service
management operations for heterogeneous networks. This
ontology provides formal semantics that capture concepts of
context information for helping in the service management
operations and also augments the information model for adding
domain-specific user’s context data. Using this ontology, we
have created a “knowledge plane” that supports the reasoning
needed by autonomic networks. We have studied the use of
ontology autonomic elements for gathering raw context and
integrating it to improve and/or enhance the user’s context
representation. Finally, we provide a study and analysis for
ensuring the efficient handling and dissemination of context
information to overlay applications in autonomic environments
for self-managing or self-configuring service operations.
Keywords-Context Information, Context-Awareness, Ontology,
Ontology-based Integration, Context-Aware Systems, Pervasive
Computing, Autonomic Computing, Autonomic Networks.
1. Introduction
Information technology advances and the evolution in
communication services towards mobility demand the
integration of information in heterogeneous, distributed
technologies and systems. Context-awareness plays an
important role in next generation networks and
communications systems which, since the incorporation
of the mobility concept to communications systems, have
required the development of extensible context models
that enable the efficient representation for handling and
distribution of the information in the information systems.
Interoperability of the information systems is
synonymous with cross-layer interaction, involving both
the communication capabilities of the devices and the
elementary services of the middleware environment.
When we talk about information interoperability, we
refer to scenarios with a mixture of technologies; these
scenarios have many systems and devices, and
consequently different techniques and mechanisms for
generating and sharing information. In each one of these
scenarios, the data models that the information systems
use are different, prohibiting the sharing and reuse of vital
information. Hence, the way to achieve the efficient and
information model that defines critical concepts in a
technology neutral form, and then deriving data models
from this information model that support the free
exchange of knowledge [1][2]. The challenge is to
promote information interoperability in the systems
combining network technologies, middleware, and
Internet facilities, to create an environment where the
information between the devices and the applications and
their services is always available. In this sense, Ontology
Engineering has been proven as a formal mechanism for
solving problems in meaning and understanding. Today,
most proposals for context representation ignore the
importance of the relationships between context data and
communication networks. We propose an ontology for
creation, delivery and management of context-aware
services, and also for integration of user’s context
information in service management operations (CONAN).
CONAN is inspired from the EU IST-Context project
and also is being addressing towards the research activity
in the autonomic computing management area [1][3]. The
synergy obtained between context-awareness, ontologies
and autonomic networking promotes the definition of a
new, extensible, and scalable knowledge platform for the
integration of context information and services support.
Our approach defines a set of dialects and/or patois
following a formal lexicon defined in OWL; this can be
used to support the integration of context information in
service management operations, policy-based systems and
atonomic networks, as figure 1 shows. This is an
innovative aspect of our research work and part of our
contributions in the information technologies (IT) area.
Figure 1. Ontology Vocabulary for CONTEXT in Autonomic Networks

1-4244-0353-7/07/$25.00 ©2007 IEEE

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 This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the ICC 2007 proceedings.
This paper is organized as follow: Section 2 describes
the most important issues related to ontology-based
principles. In section 3, we review ontology as a set of
semantic and knowledge-based representation tools for
context information; then, in section 4, we describe the
design requirements for our ontology for the creation,
delivery and management of context-aware services
supported by autonomic networks (CONAN), and show
how the ontology can be used in autonomic elements for
gathering raw context and integrating this context
information into a higher abstraction for management
service operations. Section 5 presents the most
compelling contributions on ontologies for context
modelling using ontologies, and finally the concluding
remarks are presented in Section 6.
2. Ontology-Based Principles
Ontology is a formal mechanism for representation of
a conceptualization in a shared domain [4]. Ontology is a
description (like a specification of a program in a formal
language) of the concepts and relationships that can exist
for an entity or a community of entities. Put another way,
ontology is a systematic explanation of the existence of an
entity using a formal representation..
An ontology must be explicit, formal and open.
Explicit means that the entities and relationships used,
and the constraints on their use, are precisely and
unambiguously defined in a declarative language suitable
for knowledge representation. Formal refers to the fact
that the ontology should be representable in a formal
grammar. Open means that all users of an ontology will
represent a concept using the same or equivalent set of
entities and relationships.
However, ontology is not only for knowledge
representation. For example, multiple researchers show
many advantages of using ontologies in the IT area, such
as for capturing, defining, sharing, and reusing
knowledge, along with verifiying the correctness of
knowledge and being able to reason about an event using
the stored knowledge of the ontology.
2.1. Semantic & knowledge-based representation tools
Ontology as a mechanism for helping systems to
represent knowledge has a large number of example
applications; the following sections represent some of the
most important applications.
Ontology as a Specification Mechanism
Pragmatically, ontology defines the lexicon that a
language uses to define the set of queries, commands, and
assertions that are available. The language represents an
agreement to use the shared vocabulary in a coherent and
consistent manner. Hence, the first and most basic activity
that can be done with ontologies is the definition of
knowledge that can be retrieved. This includes things,
objects, activities, and other entities of interest, including
events that have occurred in the environment of the
system. This enables sensor elements, such as agents, to
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all use a formal language to describe contextual data in a
common way.
Not all the ontologies are built using the same structure.
In fact, a number of possible languages can be used, e.g.,
Ontolingua (this uses an internal language, KIF [5], and
provides an integrated environment to create and manage
ontologies); other languages include KL-ONE, CLASSIC
and LOOM. The Open Knowledge Base Connectivity
(OKBC) model and languages like KIF-Knowledge
Interchange Format and CL-Common Logic are examples
that have become the bases of other ontology languages.
There are also languages based on a form of logic thought
to be especially computable known as description logics,
for instance DAML+OIL.
Today, the most common exemplar for a service
definition language is without doubt the semantic web.
The huge quantity of information on the Web emphasized
the need to have a common lexicon, which in turn raised
interest in using ontologies. The Semantic Web gave rise
to a new family of languages, including RDF and the Web
Ontology Language (OWL) standard. Both are integral
parts of the SemanticWeb, and the latter is a W3C
recommendation. OWL comes with three variations
(OWL Full, OWL DL and OWL Lite), each one with own
properties that provide different levels of expressiveness
for sharing knowledge. This in turn was the basis for new
variations: OWL–Flight focused in LP (Logic
programming) framework [6]; Ongoing work is
proceeding on integrating rules in ontology inspired by
some OWL modelling weaknesses; the building of new
languages on top of OWL for specific applications like
OWL–S (OWL for Webservices) is now accelerating.
Ontology as an Operational Mechanism
Ontologies are used to describe and establish semantic
commitments about a well-known domain for a set of
agents with the objective that they can communicate
without complicated translation operations into a global
group [7][8]. The idea of semantic commitment [4][9] is a
function that links terms of the ontology vocabulary with
a conceptualization. In particular, it enables the system to
communicate about a domain of discourse without
necessarily operating on a globally shared theory.
Knowledge is attributed to agents who don’t need to
know where the commitments were done, just what they
are and how to use them; an agent "knows" something if it
acts as if it had the information and is acting rationally to
achieve its goals. Then, we can define conditions that
agents can use to operate with "actions" of the agents; this
can be seen as a functional interface to tell the agents how
to operate for sharing, reuse, verification and reasoning.
Ontologies allow the exchange of information between
applications at the same and/or different levels of
abstractions; this is an important goal, and provides
operational advantages for the user of services and
applications. The semantic commitments defined in the
ontologies are used to delineate in each case the
knowledge that can be shared with agents that commit to
 This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the ICC 2007 proceedings.

the ontologies. Likewise, the ontologies provide the storage formats, such as OWL, RDF Schemas, XML and
semantic structures necessary to allow gathering, HTML, etc.
managing and storing efficiently the context information
in the services and applications.

3. CONAN: CONTEXT Ontology Supporting

CAS on Autonomic Networks
In this section we present the ontology for creation,
delivery and management of context-aware services
supported by autonomic networks (CONAN).
3.1. Domain and Scope Definition
We build upon and extend the entity model for
modelling context in context-aware services from the EU
IST-CONTEXT project, using ontologies as a formal
mechanism to integrate both the context information and
the policy-based services management system. The
synergy obtained in this process results in our novel
ontology for integration of context information, extensible
and interoperable, for services in autonomic networks,
under the umbrella of the programmable, adaptive
technology inherent in autonomic networks.
3.2. Classes and Class Hierarchy Definition
In business support systems, applications and services
are usually organised into administrative domains. As a
result of the dynamic nature of context, and following
previous research work [17], we have identified that
person, place, task and object are the most fundamental
contextual data required for representing and capturing
the notion of context in the ontology. Figure 2 shows the
CONAN upper level ontology. The ontology is structured
as a set of abstract classes describing a physical or virtual
object in the service domain with attributes and
relationships.
3.3. Capture
Currently, there has been an expansive use of XML in
different stages of knowledge capture, as well as to
abstractions for formalizing the knowledge. It is in this
context that we use the XML Language to represent the
context information model. Using this language has
several advantages: a) XML is a mark-up language for
documents containing structured information, but can also
be used as a mechanism to exchange and store data; b)
DTDs (Document Type Definition) and XSDs (XML
Schema Definition) can be used to validate the documents
created automatically when representing the context
information; we have implemented a JAVA program for
this as well as for creating and maintaining XML
documents; c) the use of XQuery to find specific context
information inside the XML documents that contain all
the information related to a specific entity provides
powerful searching capability.
We have chosen Protégé as our ontology editor. We use
it to construct ontologies, customize data entry forms, and
enter data. It is also a platform which can be easily used
to include graphical components (graphs, tables) and offer
Figure 2. CONAN Upper Ontology Representation.
3.4. Coding
Currently, the biggest ontology driver is the Semantic
Web. Software tools are available to accomplish most
aspects of ontology development. While ontology editors
are useful during each step outlined above, other types of
ontology building tools are also needed along the way.
Development projects often involve solutions using
numerous ontologies from external sources as well as
existing and newly developed in-house ontologies.
Ontologies from any source may progress through a series
of versions. In the end, careful management of this
collection of heterogeneous ontologies becomes necessary
to keep track of them. Tools also help to map and link
between them, compare them, reconcile and validate
them, merge them, and convert them into other forms.
Other tools can help acquire, organize, and visualize the
domain knowledge before and during the building of a
formal ontology derived from or transformed into forms
such as W3C XML Schemas, database schemas, and
UML, to achieve integration with associated enterprise
applications.
Our proposal is founded on the OWL Ontology
Language. Figure 4 shows part of the OWL Ontology
represented in XML, as an example of the multiple
contents supported by Protégé for representing, editing,
and managing ontologies. The objective of integrating and
harmonising this work in XML is to create an extensible
context information model, augmented with ontological
data, that is usable by the semantic web for better
supporting web services. This is part of our future
research.

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ontology-based managers, which are internal components

<!DOCTYPE owl [
<!ENTITY CONANModel "http://nmg.upc.edu/ontologies/1.0/CONANModel#"> in autonomic elements [1][10], as ontology-based
<!ENTITY xsd "http://nmg.upc.edu/ontologies/1.0/XMLSchema#"> reasoners. The following application testbed is proposed
<!ENTITY owl "http://nmg.upc.edu/ontologies/1.0/owl#"> ]>
<rdf:RDF as a feasible verification and validation scenario for
xmlns:owl =http://nmg.upc.edu/ontologies/1.0/owl#
xmlns:rdf ="http://nmg.upc.edu/ontologies/1.0/01-rdf-syntax-ns#"
autonomic elements using the CONAN ontology and
xmlns:rdfs=http://nmg.upc.edu/ontologies/1.0/rdf-schema# supporting context-aware services.
xmlns:xsd ="&xsd;“
xmlns ="&CONANModel;“ The use of the context information in autonomic
xml:base ="http://nmg.upc.edu/ontologies/1.0/CONANModel" >
<owl:Ontology rdf:about="http://nmg.upc.edu/ontologies/1.0/CONANModel"> elements has two main advantages. The first and most
<rdfs:comment>
An ontology for Integration of Context in Network Operations and Business
common is for checking the consistency of the context
Support Systems. data; the second and more important is the reasoning for
</rdfs:comment>
<owl:versionInfo>1.0</owl:versionInfo> deducing implicit context from low-level context
</owl:Ontology>
<!–
information. To understand the importance of these two
CONAN Ontology: this ontology attempts to capture vocabuaries and concepts that main advantages, we consider a scenario where a user
often used when context-aware services are created, delivered and managed and
they are operated on Autonomic networks. wants to create a communication service in a business-
Author: Martin Serrano oriented system supported by a policy-role platform that
CVS Version: $Revision: 1.00 $, $Date: 2006/09/05 22:05:18 $
--> uses context information to customize the service
<owl:Class rdf:ID="Person">
<owl:unionOf rdf:parseType="Collection">
according with the user’s context.
<owl:Class rdf:about="#AtomicObject"/>
<owl:Class rdf:about="#CompoundObject"/>
</owl:unionOf>
<rdfs:subClassOf>
<owl:Restriction>
<owl:onProperty rdf:resource="#object"/>
<owl:object>1</owl:object>
</owl:Restriction>
</rdfs:subClassOf>
<rdfs:subClassOf>
<owl:Restriction>
<owl:onProperty rdf:resource="#device"/>
<owl:device>1</owl:device>
</owl:Restriction>
</rdfs:subClassOf>
<rdfs:subClassOf>
<owl:Restriction>
<owl:onProperty rdf:resource="#application"/>
<owl:application>1</owl:application>
</owl:Restriction>
</rdfs:subClassOf>
</owl:Class>

Figure 3. OWL CONAN Ontology Example.

3.5. Integration Figure 4. Autonomic Elements as Ontology Reasoners.

Reuse of existing ontologies is a task that ontology
development must anticipate. Indeed, it is this feature that
will speed up the development of new extensible and
powerful ontologies in the future. The integration of
ontologies is an important task in the ontology
development area; however, this issue is out of scope of
this paper. We are considering this for future research.
3.6. Evaluation
The evaluation of an ontology involves the syntactic
revision for logical and semantic inconsistencies, as well
as ensuring that all semantic relationships are present and
make sense. Exposing the ontology to subject-matter
experts in the area of concern, as well as in other related
domains, is always the best way to determine if the
ontology is complete and extensible. We employ formal
versioning control of the ontology to support this.
In this section we present results from ongoing work
with autonomic elements for supporting the creation,
delivery and management of context-aware services. A set
of syntactical lines for ontology-based reasoning policies
as examples of the reasoning mechanism will be shown,
including a brief description of the scenario. We use
In the scenario shown in Figure 4, each autonomic
element is in charged with managing its entire context;
this involves keeping the context information updates, and
in particular detecting variations. For example, an
autonomic element in charge of service authoring will be
responsible for updating all contextual user information,
and an ontology manager in charge of service
maintenance at the network layer will be responsible for
contextual network information that affects the user.
Next generation network scenarios ask different
networks, technologies and business rules to cooperate in
interacting with each other. This greatly increases the
complexity in managing activities and operations, which
in turn require increased computational power. Hence, the
desired performance of the systems and the services they
supply cannot be supported with existing systems. In this
sense, autonomic elements using ontology reasoning can
help to manage the multiplicity of technologies and
diversity of systems in order to handle contextual
problems locally; this frees system resources to make
decisions for higher-level functions, such as planning and
service optimization.

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programmable nodes of an overlay network for

Reasoning Mechanism for Autonomic Elements supporting autonomic systems.
The ontology reasoning tasks in our research use The task of the programmable layer is to provide a
description logic; this provides a compelling human uniform, open, modular executing environment to support
interaction and, by efficiency reasons, fulfill the important the logic of the services and the autonomic elements
logical requirements expressed by policies. functionality.
We have chosen ontology reasoning as a decision- The work of this paper formalizes the context
making mechanism due to its high usefulness in multiple information model using by augmenting the information
aspects of context-aware computing, and by the strong model with ontological data. It is based on a non-
policy-driven relationship with user-centric services. For dependent network architecture developed in the
example, when explicit context is acquired from context framework of the IST-CONTEXT project [3], following
sources or sensors directly and, based on that raw context the proof of concept principles from autonomic networks.
it is also possible to derive implicit context, additional
information is deduced from explicit context to customize Ontology Details Supporting Scenario
a user’s service. For example, table 1 shows examples of
the policies governing ontology reasoning in the scenario For the described scenario, the user’s context
describe previously in this paper, where explicit context information, along with the context information from the
information is acquired and then as result of a context networks being used, is used to customize services and
composition activity, additional information is deduced. resources that control the deployment of those services.
The activity of composing the context is relegated to the
Table 1. Ontology-Based Reasoning Policies autonomic elements. The context-aware service becomes
more efficient at the time of service customization
Explicit Context Representation because the autonomic elements are better able to detect
Reasoning Policies Examples
<owl:ObjectValue rdf:ID="locatedIn"> the exact nature of context changes and hence, are able to
<rdfs:comment=owlTransitiveProperty”/> If (userOf: Service001) & (locatedIn: Office) reduce the signaling required in the network.
<owl:inverseOf rdf:resource=”#position”/> Then (StartService001)
<Person rdf:ID=”User001”> Figure 5 shows a specific definition for the low-level
<locatedIn rdf:resource=#Office”/> If (locatedIn: Office) & (Scheduled: Meeting) domain scenario. A set of general classes and sub-classes
</Person> Then (MPLSTunnel)
<Task rdf:Date=”Scheduled”> from the CONAN ontology are defined to capture and
<scheduledAt rdf:resource=”#05122006/> If (aServiceAt: Office) & (userOf: Date) represent the explicit and deduced context information in
</Task> Then (StopService001) or
If (userOf: Service002) & (Scheduled: Date)
the scenario described to support context-aware services.
Deduced Context Representation
Then (StopService001)
<owl:Person rdf:ID="User001">
<locatedIn rdf:resource=”#Office”/> If (userOf: Service002) & (locatedIn: Home)
<Deduced rdf:ID=”Office” > Then (StartService002)
<locatedIn rdf:resource=#User001”/>
</Deduced> If (userOf: Service003) & (Scheduled: Meeting)
<Object rdf:Meeting=”Service”> & (locatedIn: Home) Then (CreateVPN)
<contains
rdf:resources=”#MPLSTunnel”/>
</Object>

The main issue in the design of autonomic elements is

the representation and maintenance of knowledge to
facilitate the establishment of
- relations between input data and root causes.
- relations between output actions and effects, and
- policies constraining acceptable and desirable action
with the objective to facilitate the exchange of
information.
This information is converted to more general
knowledge, and is often represented in rules which the
autonomic systems can manage more easily.

Deployment of Ontology Reasoners

The autonomic element containing the core ontology
manager must not be technology dependent; otherwise,
this limits its usage to entities that understand and speak
that technology. Therefore, we have used programmable
technology for this purpose. Autonomic elements can be
deployed within service sessions running in
Figure 5. Ontology for a specific low-level domain scenario.

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 This full text paper was peer reviewed at the direction of IEEE Communications Society subject matter experts for publication in the ICC 2007 proceedings.
The testbed for the scenario consists of the following
components:
• VPN server and Programmable Nodes: These devices
are the endpoints of the VPNs, and are used to deduce
context. It simulates autonomic elements with
ontology-based reasoners for context composition.
• User's Portal: This is the IP/Mobile terminal, which
connects to users using a VPN for customizing
services; it is also used to observe and retrieve data
describing the user’s context information.
• Management Station: This simulates a context
information data service provider and contains the
policies and context database as well management
applications for the entire system (autonomic system
environment).
4. Related Works
Some approaches are presented here that pointing out to
reduce complexity and improve quality of service through
the advancement of self-managing capabilities. A project
for simplifying large scale creation and management for
grid applications is Optimal, IBM [11]. Another approach
that is more customer-oriented is the Adaptive Enterprise,
HP [12]; this system helps customers to build a layered
system. (Business, service and resource). An approach for
self-administered database systems is AutoAdmin,
Microsoft [13]. An interesting and probably more integral
approach for managing data centers by including resource
virtualization, service provisioning and policy automation
techniques is N1, Sun [14]. A global persistent data store
for scaling to billions of users is OceanStore, UC
Berkeley [15]. An application for providing the
applications developers with all the tools required to
specify the appropriate control and management schemes
to maintain any quality of service requirements is
Autonomia, University of Arizona [16]. However one of
the most interesting projects is eBiquity, University of
Baltimore County [17]. It explores the interactions
between mobile, pervasive computing, multi-agent
systems and artificial intelligence techniques integrating
different patois used in technology and software areas.
5. Conclusions and Further Work
Currently, we have explored the use of ontologies for
various parts of the ontology-based manager. We have
used OWL classes for specifying and defining the states
that manage the context information of the system, which
is then used for defining finite state machine definitions
for the context information service adaptive behaviour.
Decision activities related to autonomic elements in the
autonomic networks for supporting context-aware
services should be coordinated by a trustworthy ontology-
based autonomic manager, one that is well known by the
autonomic elements. This can be achieved by using a
secure discovery protocol. This enables trust decisions to
be made based on the activity of ontology reasoners.
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The main advantage of using an ontology-based
autonomic element approach is the isolation achieved
between explicit context and implicit context information.
This enables more accurate reasoning to be done, since
different weights can be assigned on implicit vs. explicit
context information.
Our future work will concentrate on creating an
extensible context information model, augmented with
ontological data, that is usable by the semantic web for
better supporting web services.
Acknowledgments
This paper refers partially to research work developed in the
EU-IST Context project and act as an extension research work
towards ontology-based context information modelling, which
involves architectures for supporting context-aware services.
This research activity is co-funded by Ministerio de Educación y
Ciencia under the project TSI2005-06413. Thank you to all the
colleagues that helped in the realisation/editing of this paper.
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