Mobile Ontologies: Concept, Development, Usage, and Business Potential

The number of mobile subscribers in the world is soon reaching the three billion mark. According to the newest estimates, majority of the subscribers are already in the developing countries, whereas the number of subscribers in the industrialized countries is about to stagnate around one billion. Because especially in the developing countries the only access to Internet are mobile devices, developing high quality services based on them grows in importance. Ontologies are an important ingredient towards more complicated mobile services and wider usage of mobile terminals. In this article, we first discuss ontology and epistemology concepts in general. After that, we review ontologies in the computer science field and introduce mobile ontologies as a special category of them. It seems reasonable to distinguish between two orthogonal categories, mobile domain ontologies and flowing ontologies. The domain of the former one is in some sense related with mobility, whereas the latter ones are able to flow from computer to computer in the network. We then discuss the creation issues, business aspects, and intellectual property rights (IPR), including patentability of mobile ontologies. We also discuss some basic requirements for computer systems architectures that would be needed to support the usage of mobile ontologies.