Extending intelligent collaboration using semantic information in the VirCA system

The collaboration of different intelligent devices can extend the capabilities of computer systems, but the organization of the collaboration brings on further problems to solve. One problem is the exact description of the capabilites of single devices, which has to be processed automatically for an efficient organization. This paper presents a solution for this problem with the usage of semantic information, i.e. such a representation, which can express the meaning of the capabilities of the devices and can be processed by computer systems. As the basis of such a collaboration, the VirCA system is taken, which can manage the collaboration of different intelligent devices in a virtual environment in the conventional way. Then, it is demonstrated, how the VirCA system can be extended in order to support semantic information based collaboration. The structure of this paper is the following: In the first section, a brief introduction of semantic technologies is presented with the forms of appropriation. In the second section, the VirCA system itself is introduced as a platform of collaboration between intelligent systems. In the third section, the extention of the VirCA system with semantic information is presented together with the architecture of the semantic components and the operation of the system. In the fourth section, the technology behind the semantic information management in VirCA is detailed, e.g. the ontologies applied together with some current research fields. In the fifth section, example applications of the system are presented with robots as intelligent devices.