An Ontological Framework for Mobility Impaired Users Service Provision

摘要

This paper describes the ASK-IT Ontological Framework, which handles the delivery of appropriate content and services to mobility impaired users. ASK-IT is an integrated project whose goal is to develop an ambient intelligence framework that supports the needs of mobility impaired users, while on the move. These services are related to tourism, leisure, transportation, education and mobility impairments assistance. The Ontological Framework is built upon the information needs of mobility impaired users, as they have been collected by a user requirements gathering procedure. The result of this procedure provides the main input for the development of the ASK-IT ontology, which translates the user information needs to a machine understandable and interoperable format. In this way, a plethora of existing sources of content and services may be described in a semantically unified manner. One significant part of the presented Ontological Framework is the Service Alignment Tool, that allows new services to be registered as ASK-IT compatible services, whose description adhere to the ontology. This tool allows new service providers to align their web services with the ASK-IT semantic model of services, which is part of the overall ontology.