Ontology:Smart Product Description Object (SPDO)
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Ontology Overview
Name: | Smart Product Description Object (SPDO) |
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Description: | SPDO represents a core model of generic prototypical aspects of physical consumer products. Domain-specific conceptualizations can be added as modules to extend the product description, for instance concepts of the cosmetic domain. |
Purpose: | Describing physical products to realize personalized communications between different stakeholders and products |
Organization(s): | Research Center for Intelligent Media |
Author(s): | Wolfgang Maass, Sabine Janzen, Andreas Filler |
Justification | Physical products are mainly described in a non-semantic way; their descriptions exist in terms of static databases or XML structures (e.g., BMEcat , ETIM/eCl@ss and GS1). Modeling of enterprises or processes is generally sophisticated, but the description of products rarely exceeds the scope of classification. We intend to integrate physical products into communicative situations in ambient shopping environments. Therefore, semantically annotated product information is required to realize personalized communications between different stakeholders and products (Maass & Filler, 2006).
References: Maass, W. & Filler, A. Towards an infrastructure for semantically annotated physical products. In Ch. Hochberger and R. Liskowsky, editors, Informatik 2006, volume P-94 of Lecture Notes in Informatics, p. 544–549, Berlin, Springer, 2006. |
Recommended by: | Wolfgang Maass, Sabine Janzen, Andreas Filler |
Submitted by: | SabineJanzen |
Competency Questions: | Which features does the product have? What is the function of the product? How can I use the product? Who is the manufacturer? Which are the ingredients? Are there new products? Where was the product manufactured? Does productA fits to productB? What is the EAN of the product? What is the fragrance of the product? What is the name of the product? How much does the product cost? Is there a "better" product? Is there an alternative product? Is there a less expensive/more expensive/bigger/smaller variant of the product? What is the weight/dimension of the product? |
Domains: | Product development, Healthcare, Product description |
Scenario: | "Anna has dry skin and searches for a vanishing crème in a shop. She wants to take a look at the crèmes that are right for her, so she asks all products in the store for a solution to her specific skin problem. Six vanishing crèmes give notice that they want to solve her problem because they are suitable for dry skin. Anna goes to the crème closest to her and initiates a dialogue with the intelligent product. She asks for the features of the crème and finds out that the crème is a gel-based moisturizer. Furthermore, she wants to know about the ingredients and the fragrance. Then, Anna asks for the price as well as current discount campaigns and matching products. The crème informs Anna about a matching eye crème with a 5% discount." |
Known issues: | |
OntologyURI: |
http://im.dm.hs-furtwangen.de/ontologies/spdo/2010b/SPDO_Cosmetics.owl (1491) |
Licensing: | |
Web references: | |
Other references: |
Long Description
Since 2005, we are working on the Smart Product Description Object (SPDO) - a semantic and dynamic product information that describes Smart Products in ambient environments. It enables an advanced and automatic processing in terms of updates and extensions based on rule languages, for instance SWRL (Maass & Filler, 2007; Maass et al., 2007). Our first version of the SPDO consisted of three parts – the foundational ontology (DOLCE Ultralite), the Container Model and Domain-Specific Ontologies (Janzen & Maass, 2008). The Container Model covered five facets: Product Description, Business Description, Community Description, Presentation Description and Trust&Security Description. Each of the facets was able to be extended by domain-specific information of the domain ontologies.
AmI environments are required to be context-oriented, user-centered, and network-enabled. In summary, such intelligent environments possess a modularized structure consisting of (1) users, (2) objects, (3) services, (4) physical space, (5) infosphere (information space), and (6) social space. The first version of the SPDO integrated all scopes of this structure in a single ontology. This did not correspond to the modular character of ambient environments and affected the processing of the ontology within the ambient environment, more precisely Tip `n Tell (Maass & Filler, 2006) negatively.
We developed the second version of the SPDO for an AmI application in the cosmetics domain to solve the aforementioned problems. In line with this development, we defined the Pattern-based Ontology Building Method for Ambient Environments (POnA) (Maass & Janzen, 2009). The methodology reuses UPON's detailed engineering approach and combines it with an approach proposed by the NeOn methodology that is centered on ontology design patterns. Our hypothesis is that a combination of systematic methodologies and ontology design patterns constitute a more detailed and thus efficient approach to designing ontologies for ambient environments. Based on descriptions of situation types, Competency Questions and term structures, prototypical ontology design patterns (PODPs) are derived and formally modeled by reusing Ontology Design Patterns grounded in DOLCE. PODPs consist of conceptual entities, called scopes, and relations (Maass & Varshney, 2009). There are four scopes: product, context, user and information. The product scope covers all necessary information that is part of the product itself, e.g., information about price and material.
The resulting second version of the SPDO covers the product scope and represents a core model of generic prototypical aspects of consumer products. Domain-specific conceptualizations can be added as modules, for instance concepts of the cosmetic domain. SPDO consists of 21 classes, 40 object and 30 data properties. Statements about alternative or matching products are generated by processing certain concepts of SPDO instantiations while each SPDO describes one particular product.
Now, we are able to clearly separate product-centered knowledge from other ontological parts, which is important for AmI environments. Thus, each product could be labeled by dedicated semantic product information. Instances of SPDO models are used as product-centered knowledge bases for Natural Language Processing modules and product reasoning (Janzen & Maass, 2008). In addition, SPDO is geared to concepts of standardized product descriptions (e.g. BMEcat) and affords the import and export of product information into the SPDO and respectively into external data systems.
References:
Maass, W. & Varshney, W. A Framework for Smart Healthcare Situations and Smart Drugs. SIG-Health Pre-AMCIS Workshop at the 15th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2009). San Francisco, USA.
Maass, W. & Janzen, S. A Pattern-based Ontology Building Method for Ambient Environments Workshop on Ontology Patterns - WOP2009 at the 8th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009), Washington, DC, 2009.
Janzen, S. & Maass, W. CoRA - Interactive Communication with Smart Products Workshop AmI Blocks at the European Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI-08), Nürnberg, Germany, 2008.
Janzen, S. & Maass, W. Smart Product Description Object (SPDO) Poster Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS2008), Saarbrücken, Germany, 2008.
Maass, W., Filler, A. & Janzen, S. Reasoning on Smart Products in Consumer Good Domains Workshop AmI Blocks at the European Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI-07) , Darmstadt, 2007.
Maass, W., Behrendt, W. and Gangemi, A. Carrier Model for Semantically Annotated Information Goods Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research (JTAER), 2(3), p. 18-35, 2007.
Maass, W. & Filler, A. Tip 'n Tell: Product-Centered Mobile Reasoning Support for Tangible Shopping , Proc. of MSWFB 2007: Making Semantics Work For Business, part of 1st European Semantic Technology Conference, Vienna, Austria, 2007.
Maass, W. A Tentative Design Model for Smart Products Proc. of Workshop Design of Smart Products, Furtwangen, 2007.
Filler, A. & Maass, W. Towards Navigation in Semantically Annotated Physical Product Descriptions, In: Maass, W.; Schoder, D.; Stahl, F.; Fischbach, K. (eds.): Design of Smart Products, pp. 47-54, Furtwangen, 2007.
Maass, W. & Filler, A. Towards an infrastructure for semantically annotated physical products. In Ch. Hochberger and R. Liskowsky, editors, Informatik 2006, volume P-94 of Lecture Notes in Informatics, p. 544–549, Berlin, Springer, 2006.
Additional Information
References