Ontologizing Metadata for Assistive Technologies

This paper discusses the design challenges encountered when building an ontology repository for an application framework devoted to assistive technologies that can be browsed and queried in a highly heterogeneous and expressive way. As a main vehicle to achieve this goal we propose to use metadata and meta-reasoning. We analyze how metadata can be used in the context of open repositories of ontologies, and how it can and needs to be extended in various ways. In particular, we study a redesign of the Ontology Metadata Vocabulary OMV by restructuring and enriching it with the ABC ontology and domain-specific categories for assistive technologies. Examples of an elderly assistance system illustrate how this extended OMV can support more sophisticated reasoning and querying over repositories of ontologies for assistive applications.