FIPA ontology

URL

https://sites.google.com/site/smartappliancesproject/ontologies/fipa.ttl

Description

The Fipa ontology describes a device ontology that aims at enabling interoperability between software agents, as defined by the FIPA Device Ontology Specification. This ontology can be used by agents when communicating about devices: when agents pass profiles of devices to each other, these profiles can be validated using the information contained in this ontology.

The main class of the ontology is the Device class, which defines a device and its general properties. A device has some InfoDescription, such as the name, vendor and version of the product under consideration, and has some hardware and software properties. Software properties include the details of the device’s operating system (hasOperatingSystem), such as its name, vendor and version. Hardware properties are the type of connection that the device uses (hasConnection), the amount of memory that it requires (hasMemory), the user interfaces offered by the device (hasUserInterface), and the type of central processing unit (hasCPU). The connection type is expressed in terms of name, vendor and version of the connection provider (hasConnectionInfo). The MemoryTypeDescription class defines the unit of measure of the memory (hasMemoryUnit), and its usage type, namely application, storage, or both application and storage (hasMemoryUsageType). The UIDescription class defines the information that characterize the screen of the device (hasScreen), such as its width (hasWidth), height (hasHeight), resolution (hasResolution), and the measurement units (hasWidhtHeightUnit). The ontology also defines the RequestDeviceInfo function that can be used in the FIPA framework by an agent to make a query to request the device information contained in the ontology.

Observations

• We have created an OWL version of the FIPA ontology according to the FIPA device ontology specification. This specification refers to some classes defined in other FIPA ontologies, namely the FIPA-Nomadic-Application and FIPA-Agent-Management ontologies. These ontologies are out of the scope of this study and, therefore, have not been translated to OWL. However, our Fipa ontology can be extend to consider the FIPA-Nomadic-Application by using the AgentPlatform class, and the FIPA-Agent-Management ontologies by using the QoS class.