Ontology-Based Introspection in Support of Stream Reasoning

Abstract

Building complex systems such as autonomous robots usually require the integration of a wide variety of components including high-level reasoning functionalities. One important challenge is integrating the information in a system by setting up the data flow between the components. This paper extends our earlier work on semantic matching with support for adaptive on-demand semantic information integration based on ontology-based introspection. We take two important standpoints. First, we consider streams of information, to handle the fact that information often becomes continually and incrementally available. Second, we explicitly represent the semantics of the components and the information that can be provided by them in an ontology. Based on the ontology our custom-made stream configuration planner automatically sets up the stream processing needed to generate the streams of information requested. Furthermore, subscribers are notified when properties of a stream changes, which allows them to adapt accordingly. Since the ontology represents both the systems information about the world and its internal stream processing many other powerful forms of introspection are also made possible. The proposed semantic matching functionality is part of the DyKnow stream reasoning framework and has been integrated in the Robot Operating System (ROS).