Context/Contexte in areas (2024-03-15)

What makes a true lively society is the capability of their members to autonomously adapt to others. It is not a set of norms cast in iron, be they programming norms or ’legal norms’. It is a set of beings trying to behave with others. This behaviour may lead to explicit norms that make explicit what should not have/need to be reinvented, but they may well remain implicit, hence continuously adapted. We should design software agents so that they are able to elaborate what drives their (social but not only) behaviours. They should be allowed to try, to make mistakes, and to transmit what they know. This is the ground on which evolution may happen. This capacity is what should be built in agents in order for them to behave without breaking too many things. The goal is not to reach a static equilibrium: in an open-ended agent space there are always opportunities to learn new things, meet new people and visit new places. Hence, rather than the state reached by agents, this is they ability to surf a dynamic disequilibrium that must be sought. This statement is somewhat made for triggering reactions within the seminar. It reacts to the apparent loss of autonomy of agents. It also extend the one I did for the previous seminar.

There are many experiments with buildings that communicate information to and react to instructions from inhabiting systems. Fortunately, the life of people does not stop at the door of those buildings. It is thus very important that from one building to another, from a building to its outside, and from a building considered as a whole to specific rooms, continuity in the perceived information and potential actions be ensured. One way to achieve this would be by standardising representation vocabularies that any initiative should follow. But, at such an early stage, this would be an obstacle to innovation, because experimenters do not know yet what is needed in their context. We advocate that semantic technologies, in addition to be already recognised as a key component in communicating building platforms, are adequate tools for ensuring interoperability between building settings. For that purpose, we first present how these technologies (RDF, OWL, SPARQL, Alignment) can be used within ambient intelligent applications. Then, we review several solutions for ensuring interoperability between heterogeneous building settings, in particular through online embedded matching, alignment servers or collaborative matching. We describe the state of the art in ontology matching and how it can be used for providing interoperability between semantic descriptions.

Presence management, i.e., the ability to automatically identify the status and availability of communication partners, is becoming an invaluable tool for collaboration in enterprise contexts. In this paper, we argue for efficient presence management by means of a holistic view of both physical context and virtual presence in online communication channels. We sketch the components for enabling presence as a service integrating both online information as well as physical sensors, discussing benefits, possible applications on top, and challenges of establishing such a service.

Pervasive computing aims at providing services for human beings that interact with their environment, encompassing objects and humans who reside in it. Applications must be able to take into account the context in which users evolve, e.g., physical location, social or hierarchical position, current tasks as well as related information. These applications have to deal with the dynamic integration in the environment of new, and sometimes unexpected, elements (users or devices). In turn, the environment has to provide context information to newly designed applications. We describe an architecture in which context information is distributed in the environment and context managers use semantic web technologies in order to identify and characterize available resources. The components in the environment maintain their own context expressed in RDF and described through OWL ontologies. They may communicate this information to other components, obeying a simple protocol for identifying them and determining the information they are capable to provide. We show how this architecture allows the introduction of new components and new applications without interrupting what is working. In particular, the openness of ontology description languages makes possible the extension of context descriptions and ontology matching helps dealing with independently developed ontologies.

L'informatique pervasive a pour but d'offrir des services fondés sur la possibilité pour les humains d'interagir avec leur environnement (y compris les objets et autres humains qui l'occupent). Les applications dans ce domaine doivent être capable de considérer le contexte dans lequel les utilisateurs évoluent (qu'il s'agisse de leur localisation physique, leur position sociale ou hiérarchique ou leurs tâches courantes ainsi que des informations qui y sont liées). Ces applications doivent gérer dynamiquement l'irruption dans la scène de nouveaux éléments (utilisateurs ou appareils) même inconnus et produire de l'information de contexte utile à des applications non envisagées. Après avoir examiné les différents modèles de contexte étudiés en intelligence artificielle et en informatique pervasive, nous montrons en quoi ils ne répondent pas directement à ces besoins dynamiques. Nous décrivons une architecture dans laquelle les informations de contexte sont distribuées dans l'environnement et où les gestionnaires de contexte utilisent les technologies développées pour le web sémantique afin d'identifier et de caractériser les ressources disponibles. L'information de contexte est exprimée en RDF et décrite par des ontologies en OWL. Les dispositifs de l'environnement maintiennent leur propre contexte et peuvent communiquer cette information à d'autres dispositifs. Ils obéissent à un protocole simple permettant de les identifier et de déterminer quelles informations ils sont susceptibles d'apporter. Nous montrons en quoi une telle architecture permet d'ajouter de nouveaux dispositifs et de nouvelles applications sans interrompre ce qui fonctionne. En particulier, l'ouverture des langages de description d'ontologies permettent d'étendre les descriptions et l'alignement des ontologies permet de considérer des ontologies indépendantes.

In a pervasive computing environment, heterogeneous devices need to communicate in order to provide services adapted to the situation of users. So, they need to assess this situation as their context. We have developed an extensible context model using semantic web technologies and a context information management component that enable the interaction between context information producer devices and context information consumer devices and as well as their insertion in an open environment.

In a pervasive environment, heterogeneous devices need to communicate in order to provide services adapted to users. We have developed an extensible context model using semantic web technologies and a context information management component that enable the interaction between context information producer devices and context information consumer devices and as well as their insertion in an open environment.