Designing Ontologies for Moving Objects Applications

The focus of this work is on the design of ontologies to support the exchange and sharing of information among applications dealing with moving objects. This application area ranges from fleet management systems to the monitoring of the users of mobile phones to provide location-based services. The use of ontologies for interoperability purposes has been long-praised; here, we focus on the comprehension and registration of the fundamental mobile ontologies to exchange information. In particular, to better understand and register the ontologies and their relations involved in this domain, we first analyze the important concept of movement, its properties and relationships within the spatiotemporal environment. Based on this, we further describe fundamental mobile ontologies; this description can act as a guideline for recording additional mobile ontologies depending on the needs of the application. We then show how mobile ontologies and moving objects interact. We present an architectural approach that serves as a means for application systems to share information based on mobile ontologies. Two different application scenarios–one with traffic management systems and another coming from the mobile communications area–using and exchanging ontologies illustrate the applicability of this approach.