An Ontological Framework for Dynamic Coordination

Abstract

Coordination is the process of managing the possible interactions between activities and processes; a mechanism to handle such interactions is known as a coordination regime. A successful coordination regime will prevent negative interactions occurring (e.g., by preventing two processes from simultaneously accessing a non-shareable resource), and wherever possible will facilitate positive interactions (e.g., by ensuring that activities are not needlessly duplicated). We start from the premise that effective coordination mechanisms require the sharing of knowledge about activities, resources and their properties, and hence, that in a heterogeneous environment, an ontological approach to coordination is appropriate. After surveying recent work on dynamic coordination, we describe an ontology for coordination that we have developed with the goal of coordinating semantic web processes. We then present a implementation of our ideas, which serves as a proof of concept for how this ontology can be used for dynamic coordination. We conclude with a summary of the presented work, illustrate its relation to the Semantic Web, and provide insights into future extensions.

Perspectives on Internet of Things and Its Applications

“…To address semantic heterogeneity issue, researchers proposed data representation method based on Ontology [34,35]. Ontology accurately describes the conception and the intrinsic relationship of conceptions.…”

Smart Semantic Middleware for the Internet of Things

“…Role-based modelling also provides the advantage of separation of concerns and in so design of complex systems (Cabri et al, 2004). The latter direction presents the need to enable agents to communicate their intentions with respect to future activities and resource utilization and to reason about the actions, plans, and knowledge of each other, in real time (Tamma et al, 2005).…”

Towards Service-Oriented Ontology-Based Coordination

“…Note that any (datatype or object) property may not be associated with a value, and therefore, status may also take the value null, but this should not occur in our model. More details on the other classes of this ontology may be found in [13]. Finally, each Resource is managed by one of the CoordinationMechanisms indicated by the property isCoordinatedWith.…”

“…Based on previous work by the multi-agents systems community [3,7,10,14] such an ontology has been developed [13]. It defines coordination in terms of agents (or "actors") and the possible relationships between them.…”