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The Delivery Context Ontology provides a formal model of the characteristics of the environment in which devices interact with the Web or other services. The Delivery Context includes the characteristics of the Device, the software used to access the service and the Network providing the connection among others.
The Delivery Context is an important source of information that can be exploited to create context-aware applications, thus providing a compelling user experience.
The ontology is formally specified in the Web Ontology Language [OWL]. This document describes the ontology and gives details of each term that it contains.
The normative definition of the ontology terms is generated automatically from the OWL file.
This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document. A list of current W3C publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found in the W3C technical reports index at http://www.w3.org/TR/.
This is a Last Call Working Draft of a possible future W3C Recommendation, following the Second Public working draft published on April 15th 2008 (see the changes since the previous publication).
Comments on this document should be sent to the public public-uwa-comments@w3.org mailing list (archived at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-uwa-comments/).
Publication as a Last Call Working Draft does not imply endorsement by the W3C Membership. This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than work in progress.
This document is published as part of the W3C Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity by the Ubiquitous Web Applications Working Group. It is a deliverable as defined in the Charter of that group.
This document was produced by a group operating under the 5 February 2004 W3C Patent Policy. W3C maintains a public list of any patent disclosures made in connection with the deliverables of the group; that page also includes instructions for disclosing a patent. An individual who has actual knowledge of a patent which the individual believes contains Essential Claim(s) must disclose the information in accordance with section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy.
1 Introduction
1.1 Overview
1.2 Motivation
1.3 Understanding the Delivery Context Ontology
2 Reading the Recommendation
2.1 Normative and Informative Parts
2.2 Normative Language for Conformance Requirements
2.3 CURIE Prefix Bindings
2.4 Reading Term Descriptions
2.4.1 Class Description Specific Fields
2.4.2 Property Description Specific Fields
2.4.3 Instance Description Specific Fields
3 The Ontology
3.1 Definition of the Ontology
3.2 Ontology URI
3.3 Ontology Namespaces
3.4 Ontologies
3.4.1 Common
3.4.2 Delivery Context
3.4.3 Hardware
3.4.4 Java
3.4.5 Location
3.4.6 Network
3.4.7 Push
3.4.8 Software
3.4.9 Web Browsing
3.5 Class Hierarchy Summary
3.6 Property Hierarchy Summary
3.7 Term Index
3.8 Derived Properties
A Example Instances (Non-Normative)
B Summary of changes since the SPWD (Non-Normative)
C References
C.1 Normative References
C.2 Informative References
D Ontology Resources (Non-Normative)
E Acknowledgements (Non-Normative)
This section is informative.
The DeliveryContext Ontology provides a formal model of the characteristics of the environment in which devices interact with the Web or other services. The Delivery Context includes the characteristics of the Device, the software used to access the service and the Network providing the connection among others.
The Ontology captures the context of use in which a user is interacting with a particular computing platform in a given physical environment in order to achieve an interactive task.
The Ontology is formally specified in the Web Ontology Language [OWL]. It defines a normative vocabulary of terms (classes, properties and instances) that models the different Properties, Aspects and Components (Aspect instances) of a Delivery Context.
The Delivery Context is an important source of information that can be exploited to create context-aware applications, thus providing a compelling user experience. Particularly, it can be used to adapt web content & applications to make them useable on a wide range of different devices with different capabilities.
The Ontology represents a normative, common understanding about the Delivery Context. As such it can be used as a normative reference to create specific Vocabularies, while at the same time enabling the interoperability between them.
The Delivery Context Ontology itself constitutes a vocabulary of terms and can be used in conjunction with generic APIs for retrieving Context Properties, such as [DCCI].
It is recommended to be familiar with RDF, OWL and ontologies in general before reading this specification. The [RDF-Primer] and the [OWL-Guide] are two documents which might be helpful for this purpose.
The Delivery Context Ontology is aimed at providing a formal and universally accepted model of the Delivery Context. As such it is not intended to cover all the properties that can be present in a Delivery Context, which can be application or domain dependent.
The model represented by the ontology is essentially hierarchical. At the top of the hierarchy is the
DeliveryContext
class, which gives access to the current UserAgent
, NetworkBearer
, Device
and pysical Environment
, which are the essential elements of any Delivery Context. Each of these elements are represented by classes which have different properties that model their specific characteristics and components.
This section is normative.
The normative and informative parts of this specification are identified by use of labels within various sections. Generally, everything in the specification is considered to be normative, apart from the examples.
Individual conformance requirements or testable statements are identified by the use of specific key words. In particular, the key words must, must not, required, shall, shall not, should, should not, recommended, may, and optional in this specification are to be interpreted as described in [IETF RFC 2119].
This specification makes use of [CURIEs] as an abbreviated syntax for expressing URIs. The following CURIE prefix bindings are defined:
CURIE Prefix | Value |
---|---|
common |
http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/context/common.owl# |
dcn |
http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/context/deliverycontext.owl# |
hard |
http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/context/hardware.owl# |
java |
http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/context/java.owl# |
loc |
http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/context/location.owl# |
net |
http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/context/network.owl# |
push |
http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/context/push.owl# |
soft |
http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/context/software.owl# |
web |
http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/context/web.owl# |
rdf |
http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns# |
rdfs |
http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema# |
xsd |
http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema# |
owl |
http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl# |
Each term (class, property, normative instance) is documented in an specific section within the specification. In addition there are cross references that link related terms between them.
A term description is composed by the following fields:
rdfs:label
) and full text (rdfs:comment
).It contains a list of normative references that describe precisely the intended meaning of the ontology term.
It is a list of informative references that clarifies the meaning of the ontology term.
The fields used in a class description are described as follows:
This field contains a list of all those ontology classes for which the described class is
a subclass (rdfs:subClassOf
axiom).
This field contains a list of all those ontology classes defined as a subclass (rdfs:subClassOf
axiom) of the described class.
This field contains a list of all those ontology properties which domain includes the class.
This field contains a list of all those ontology properties which range includes the class.
This field contains the property restrictions for the class. Property restrictions are documented in accordance with the OWL Abstract Syntax.
This field indicates the property type and characteristics.
This field indicates the property domain. If it does not appear it means that the property domain can be any class (owl:thing
).
This field denotes the property range. The range of a Datatype property is expressed in terms of an XML Schema datatype [XMLSCHEMA-2] or as a datarange, which enumerates the list of allowed property values. The range of an Object property is a list of classes. When the range does not appear it means that it can be anything.
This field contains a list of all those ontology properties for which the described property is
a subproperty (rdfs:subPropertyOf
axiom).
This field contains a list of all those ontology properties defined as a subproperty of (rdfs:subPropertyOf
axiom) the described property.
This field is a list that represents the class membership of the instance.
This field is composed by a list that represents the property values (represented as RDF Typed Literals) that must have the described instance.
This section is normative
The ontology is formally specified in OWL [OWL]. The documentation of the different ontology terms has been automatically generated from the OWL file.
The ontology conforms to the OWL-DL expressivity. This allows it to be used within appropriately written reasoning systems.
The ontology URI is http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/context/deliverycontext.owl
.
The table below describes the different namespace URIs defined by the ontology. For the sake of modularity, a new namespace have been defined for those terms related to a common aspect of the Delivery Context.
Namespace URI | Purpose |
---|---|
http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/context/common.owl# |
Used for General Purpose Entities |
http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/context/deliverycontext.owl# |
Entities |
http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/context/hardware.owl# |
Hardware Related Terms |
http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/context/java.owl# |
Used for Java-related terms |
http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/context/location.owl# |
Used for location-related terms |
http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/context/network.owl# |
Used for network-related terms |
http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/context/push.owl# |
Used for push-related terms |
http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/context/software.owl# |
Used for software-related terms |
http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/context/web.owl# |
Used for web-related terms |
Namespaces are described below:
The editors wish to acknowledge the contributions of members of the UWA WG.
The editors wish to acknowledge the specific written contributions of: