Beginning of this week, I was together with two of my colleagues at the kick-off of the universAAL project, which is an integrated project in the field of ambient assisted living. It aims at consolidating a common infrastructure for AAL systems based on the results of the FP6 projects SOPRANO, PERSONA, mPOWER, GENESYS, among others. The meeting was very well organized, and the motivation and commitment of the team (among them SINTEF, Fraunhofer IGD, ITACA, Ericsson Nikola Tesla, IBM Research Haifa, ProSyst Software) was very promising. We bring in our recently lauched openAAL platform, an open source middleware for ambient assisted living.

The kick-off took place in Røros, a small town in the mountains of Norway, which is a World Cultural Heritage because it has been shaped by its several hundred years of copper mining. It is a beautiful location, but for most of us this has also represented a new personal record in terms of temperature. We had a small tour to the “smelte” in the evening at –34°C, and even during the day, the temperatures were around -24°C.

Last year, we opened our living lab for ambient assisted living which we have built based on our openAAL infrastructure.

Here is now the video on YouTube:

Last week I was at the SOPRANO Conference, which presents results of our AAL Integrated Project SOPRANO to the interested public. It was colocated with the fair on home automation Beurs Domotica & Slim Wonen at Eindhoven. Apart from the key SOPRANO contributions, we had presentations from the European Commission on their strategy of facilitating the development and deployment of AAL solutions (Peter Wintlev- Jensen), on general acceptance issues by Heidrun Mollenkopf (BAGSO) on ethical aspects of AAL research (by Marjo Rauhala from Vienna), and from the PERSONA project. It really has given a good overview of the current state of research, and the open issues. Particularly the lack of deployment was addressed as part of the panel discussion. There were several opinions on this:

• Lack of societal awareness about the problems that demand for AAL solutions (we will not be able to deliver care in the same way as today as there will be many more older people than now). This leads to a lack of political support.
• Lack of awareness by the immediate carers about the possibilities, availability, and cost/benefits of AAL solutions and potentially threatening change of the role of the carer
• Too high a pace of innovation, which leads to hesistant investments
• Immaturity of the technology as to practical usability and cost effectiveness
• Lack of direct end customer approach (start with the more prosperous as early adopters)

Probably it is a mixture of all of it, but I found particularly the first one convincing as it changes the perspective: we now longer ask what added-value this technology can deliver in addition to care services and informal carers, but we ask how can we keep up a similar level of care for a much larger number of older people with fewer younger carers.

Currently I am travelling to Brussels for the negotiations of two successful EU proposals in the area of eInclusion – with a 100% success rate Call 4 of FP7 was a very efficient call Both proposals provide the opportunity to explore new paths in my second main stream of research: context-awareness. While I have started in the domain of technology-enhanced learning, the ambient-assisted living project SOPRANO has shown that the results (particularly the blackboard-based approach to context management, which allows for a combination of ontology-based techniques with statistical approaches and provides native support for uncertainty and the temporal dimension) can be easily transferred to ambient technologies. Also adaptive user interfaces are in need of a flexible context management system, as our first attempt in AGENT-DYSL has shown, which was aiming at adaptive reading support for children with dyslexia.

• In the upcoming AAL project universAAL (an Integrating Project – IP) we aim to develop our SOPRANO Ambient middleware (soon to be release as openAAL – an open source middleware for ambient assisted living) to become part of a reference architecture and open source implementation of a universal AAL infrastructure, together with a promising consortium of 18 partners.
• Within myUI (a STREP), we aim at “synergistic user modeling”, i.e., device-independent capturing of the user’s context so that we can more easily engineer adaptive user interfaces for various devices, particularly for users with special needs, like the elderly, but also others.

I am already looking forward to those projects, which will probably start in the first quarter 2010, although this will again mean an increased number of travels (which I could successfully reduce in 2009).

Last week we had the very successful second annual review of the Integrated Project SOPRANO in the field of Ambient Assisted Living. Our approach to a semantic middleware based on OSGi has been highly appreciated. At the core is on the one side a context management approach, which is largely based on my PhD work and has been developed further by my colleague Peter Wolf, on the other side the semantic service description approach from DIANE, which Michael Klein from CAS has developed. Our lightweight semantics approach on both sides plays very well together, as the following presentation shows:

We want plan to make this technology available to everyone. Stay tuned.

After a successful OntoContent 2007 workshop, we are now preparing a next instance of the OntoContent workshop series. This year will will concentrate on user-centered semantics (under the theme of Web 3.0) and on collecting experiences on ontology engineering and maintenance from the fields of Human Resources, and e-health/life sciences/ambient assisted living.

Ontology Content and Evaluation in Enterprise
with two Special Tracks on Human Resources and E-Health/AAL

in conjunction with OnTheMove Federated Conferences 2008, Monterrey, Mexico

http://ontocontent2008.mature-ip.eu

Under the buzz word Semantic Web a lot of research has been going on in recent years, exploring formalisms for expressing ontologies, reasoning algorithms for inferencing hidden knowledge in an open world, but also on “semantifying” different types of problems. But outside the Semantic Web research community, there has been little uptake so far. This is also due to the fact that the concept of ontology is more about content than formalism, and we are in dire need for content-related research and experiences. As Braun et al. 2007 stated, a “good” ontology is a balance of the degree of social agreement, the level of formality, and the appropriateness for the problem at hand that is supposed to be solved with ontologies. In line with this view, the workshop is looking for experiences and empirical results on which formalism is better suited, how to achieve or measure social agreement, and how to judge whether an ontology is appropriate. It is the mission of this workshop to report on these experiences and to reflect them back to the Semantic Web community.

In the area of system design, there is currently a major shift taking place towards user-centered design, and the workshop aims to foster use-centered ontology-based system design. Therefore, we also welcome research and experiences on participatory and evolutionary approaches (i.e., with a continuously high degree of involvement of the actual users) to building and maintaining ontologies that pave the way towards a Web 3.0, bringing together users and semantics.

We also strongly encourage to submit critical papers deriving lessons from failures with “ontologies in the wild”, not only stereotypical success reports!

Workshop Structure and Topics

The workshop will consists of three main parts: a general part on experiences with real-world ontology engineering and approaches to assessment of ontologies, a special track on ontologies in Human Resources and a special track on ontologies in e-health and ambient-assisted living.

• Towards Web 3.0: a user-centered semantic web
  • lessons from Web 2.0 for ontology engineering
  • experiences with participatory and evolutionary approaches to ontology engineering (e.g., based on social software)
  • lightweight ontology formalisms (e.g., SKOS) and microformats
  • experiences/empirical results on lightweight vs. heavy-weight ontologies
  • experiences/empirical results on graphical modeling of ontologies
  • experimental evidence (e.g., from cognitive science) on conceptual modeling
  • challenges/requirements for maintenance and evolution of ontologies
  • good, best, and bad practices

• Methods for assessing ontologies
  • Ontology evaluation
  • Quality measures for ontologies
  • assessment of ontologies with regard to social agreement, formality, and appropriateness
  • experiences with assessment and evaluations methods

• Ontologies in Human Resources (Recruiting, Development, Employability)
  • modeling and representation of: Jobs, CVs, Competencies, Skills, Employees, People, Organizations, Social Events, etc.
  • HR upper level concepts
  • E-Portfolio (standards) and ontologies
  • Semantics of HR-XML
  • Semantic metadata for HR applications
  • Semantics in job matching
  • Semantics in learning technologies
  • Good/Best practices for semantics in HR
  • Maintenance of ontologies in HR

• Ontologies in E-Health and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL)
  • Upper level concepts of healthcare and life sciences ontologies.
  • Ontologies of diseases, nursing, therapeutics, drug, etc.
  • Ontologies and ontology-driven approaches in Ambient-Assisted Living
  • Maintenance of ontologies in e-health and AAL

If you feel that something fits into the theme of the workshop, but is not listed here, just contact the organizers.

Submissions

Types of papers include:

• research papers (max. 10 pages)
• case studies experience reports (preferrably from industry) (max 10 pages)
• position papers, clearly analyzing current state of practice for future challenges of research (max. 6 pages)

Papers submitted to OntoContent 2008 must not have been accepted for publication elsewhere or be under review for another workshop or conference. All submitted papers will be evaluated by at least three members of the program committee, based on originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of expression.

Papers will be published in an LNCS volume by Springer as part of OTM 2008 proceedings. Excellent papers will be considered for a journal publication or as book chapters

Important Dates

Abstract Submission Deadline: June 15, 2008
Paper Submission Deadline: June 30, 2008
Acceptance Notification : August 15, 2008
Camera Ready Due: August 25, 2008
Registration Due: August 25, 2008
OTM Conferences: November 9 – 14, 2008

Organizers

Andreas Schmidt, FZI Research Center for Information Technologies, Karlsruhe, Germany [main contact]
andreas.schmidt@fzi.de

Mustafa Jarrar, University of Cyprus
mustafa@jarrar.info

Werner Ceusters, University of Buffalo, USA

Program Committee (partially to be confirmed and to be completed)

Bill Andersen, Ontology Works, USA
Keith Baker, University of Reading, UK
Ernst Biesalski, EnBW AG, Germany
Paolo Bouquet, University of Trento, Italy,
Simone Braun, FZI Research Center for Information Technologies, Germany
Christopher Brewster, University of Sheffield, UK
Michael Brown, Skillsnet.Com
Yannis Charalabidis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Ernesto Damiani, Computer Science Department, Milan University, Italy
Aldo Gangemi, Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy
Fausto Giunchiglia, University of Trento, Italy
Giancarlo Guizzardi, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Mohand-Said Hacid, University Claude Bernard Lyon 1 LIRIS – Villeurbanne, France
Martin Hepp, DERI Innsbruck, Austria
Stijn Heymans, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Christine Kunzmann, Kompetenzorientierte Personalentwicklung, Germany
Jens Lemcke, SAP AG, Germany
Tobias Ley, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Stefanie Lindstaedt, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Alessandro Oltramari, Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy
Viktoria Pammer, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Jeff Pan, University of Aberdeen, UK
Paul Piwek, Open University, UK
Christophe Roche, Université de Savoie, France
Peter Scheir, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Pavel Shvaiko, University of Trento, Italy
Miguel-Angel Sicilia, University of Alcalá, Spain
Barry Smith, State University of New York at Buffalo, USA
Silvie Spreeuwenberg, LibRT, The Netherlands
Armando Stellato, University of Roma, Italy
Andrew Stranieri, JUSTSYS, Ballarat, Australia
Karl Stroetmann, Empirica, Germany
Sergio Tessaris, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
Robert Tolksdorf, Free University of Berlin, Germany
Francky Trichet, University of Nantes, France
Luk Vervenne, Synergetics, Belgium

Sponsoring institutions/projects

This workshop is organized in a joint effort by the Ontology Outreach Advisory (OOA), the MATURE IP, and the SOPRANO IP.

• The OOA is an international not-for-profit association that consists of industry, government, and research leaders and innovators with respect to ontology development, use, or education. The general mission of the OOA is to develop strategies for ontology recommendation and standardization, and promote the ontology technology to industry.
• The MATURE IP is a large-scale integrating European project (FP7) in the field of technology-enhanced learning aiming at support of knowledge maturing processes within and across companies, including in particular ontology maturing.
• The SOPRANO IP is an integrated European project (FP6) in the field of ambient-assisted living and follows an ontology-driven service-oriented approach to construct a flexible and affordable platform for in-house ambient-assisted living solutions.

The last three days I was at the first German AAL Congress at Berlin and presented (together with my colleague Christophe Kunze) our results in the area of context-aware technologies for ambient assisted living. This encompassed intelligent sensor systems for detecting activities and other vital parameters, our ontology-centered design methodology as well as our AAL ontology from our work in SOPRANO. I had some interesting discussions with a lot of interesting people

The congress had 330 participants on the first two days alone (and they had to close registration early in January) Demographic change was the stereotypical motivation slide… And the dominating discussion theme of the German-speaking part was the lack of business models, which was seen as a main cause for the lack of market take-up. Closer inspection revealed that the majority of problems probably is due to regulatory conditions, especially in the area of health and care insurance. This is supposed to change with the new financial system of the health insurance in Germany, starting 2009 where a lot of interesting things are expected to happen. Let’s see if this helps to reduce barriers.

The European day was dominated by the new Joint AAL Programme under Article 169, which is supposed to introduce a new funding programme that is aimed at more short-term projects (2-3 years time-to-market). The first call will be published end of March/beginning of April. Available funding does not appear to be extremely high – so the call will probably be highly competetive. Expected consortia are about the size of FP7 STREPs. The proposals will be evaluated centrally (at an European level), however, the funding contracts will be made with the national authorities. Although it was claimed that the funding regulations are making it easier to participate, especially for SMEs, because of the national funding agencies, I believe this introduces additional complexity (while FP7 rules are – also for SMEs – quite simple if they have some consulting on it). The national authorities have budget limits so that situations may arise where a consortium is recommended for funding while the national funding agency does not have any money left… Probably, also with decentralized reporting, you will generate additional overhead.

The emerging AAL community appears to be an interesting mix of various disciplines with surprisingly concrete visions and a challenging field for applied research where technology can achieve much – but only if it is embedded in a holistic solution.

Yesterday, I presented at Osnabrück the first results of our work on SOPRANO. The focus of our contribution on Ontology-Centered Design of an Ambient Middleware for Assisted Living – The Case of SOPRANO was the design methodology (ontology-centered design), making ontology engineering an architectural design activity. In the course of developing an ontology with all the stakeholders, we develop a shared conceptual understanding that makes up the foundations of the architecture. This ensures higher semantic coherence in big projects.

The workshop itself was rather small and consisted mainly of contributions from the Universities of Rostock and Jena (the organizers). Although AI in ambient environments is promising, it remains the question whether the KI conference is actually the right place for such a forum.

Within the SOPRANO project, we were working on compiling a comprehensive and interdisciplinary compilation and assessment of the state of the art in the domains relevant to creating an ambient assisted living system. It encompasses as diverse topics as Assistive Technologies, Smart Homes, Sensors, RFID, Radar Technologies, Software Architectures, Ontologies, and Context Modeling and Management. I was mainly contributing to the sections on ontologies and context modeling & management. The document is available from here.

From Jan 30 to Feb 2 I was at the kick-off meeting of the SOPRANO project, an Integrated Project funded by the European Commission under the eInclusion initiative consisting of 22 partners. It aims at an ambient assisted living solution that assists elderly people in sustaining an independent living. Within the project, we are responsible for context-aware service orchestration.