An Ontology Applied to Pervasive Hospital Environments

In the last years ontologies are being used in the development of pervasive computing applications. It is habitual their use for facilitating the interoperability among context-aware applications and the entities that may enter in the context at any time. This chapter presents OntoHealth: an ontology applied to health pervasive environment and a tool to its processing. The main idea is that a hospital could be seen as this pervasive environment, where someone, through ubiquitous computing, engages a range of computational devices and systems simultaneously, in the course of ordinary activities, and may not necessarily even be aware that they are doing so. With the proposed ontology and the tool for its processing, the medical tasks can be shared by all components of this pervasive environment. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-042-6.ch065 34 International Journal of Advanced Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, 2(3), 33-45, July-September 2010 Copyright © 2010, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. tionship is detailed. If these relationships have appropriate names that identify their meaning, a human can understand it directly, as well as a computer program can assume the semantics of a relationship and work systematically through it. The process of building ontologies is not a trivial task, considering that for its definition, it is necessary a specialized knowledge about a specific domain to avoid any kind of ambiguity or retorts related to the validity of it. Therefore, this chapter has as main goal the construction of an ontology to describe the domain of a hospital that can be used for interaction between the entities in a pervasive environment, and the implementation of a system that allows its processing. This chapter is divided as follows. The next section describes pervasive environments and ontologies. The following section describes the use of ontologies in pervasive environments. Section after that, presents OntoHealth: the ontology itself and its processing. The related and future works is presented before the conclusion.