Including Metadata into an Ontology Based Pervasive Computing Architecture

Ontologies are a common way to describe knowledge in a smart environment. They can be used to define different concepts as well as their properties and relationships and thereby define the domain knowledge of an application. Due to this characteristic, ontologies are one key feature in making applications domain independent. Nevertheless, this flexibility has some drawbacks concerning the interfaces to that knowledge. Interfaces, which for example can be consumed by mobile clients to display information about a smart environment, need to be clearly defined and have to include a static basis of properties that tell the client the semantic meaning of the data. For this purpose we propose a metadata ontology which represents the static parts in a domain independent architecture and is used in conjunction with domain ontologies. Based on the additional semantic information clearly defined interfaces can be build that not only provide the actual data, but also information about how to use that data.