DIEM Thesis: Ontology Driven Application Prototyping in a Smartspace Environment

Interoperability Work Package and Embedded Systems Laboratory of Åbo Akademi present a new DIEM related Master of Science thesis "Ontology driven application prototyping in a smartspace environment" by Jon von Weymarn.

The thesis presents a method to aid in application development using smartspaces and agents. In this method a SIB device operates as a broker that other devices communicate with. To represent information in the smartspace RDF representation and ontologies are used. This makes the information more comprehensible.

The solution presented in the thesis is a generator that creates a code framework, in the Python programming language, from a given OWL ontology. The generated framework enables an object oriented approach to data in the ontology as well as automates cumbersome tasks concerning device communication. As an example application, to illustrate the functionality and the benefit from using the generated framework, an application associated with calendar information is presented. First the application is created directly and after that the generator is used to create a framework for development of calendar applications. The application is created again, using the framework, to prove the potential the framework offers to simplify the task for the developer.