OntoUCP aims to develop a new communication platform and protocol to enable integrated human-machine and machine-machine interaction.
Today's communication protocols for machine-machine interaction are still low-level from a semantic point of view. Most communication protocols are based on a simple request-response model or on the message-passing metaphor. Hence, these protocols are hard to understand for humans without explicit technical knowledge and they support predefined interaction scenarios only.
Introducing higher semantics into communication protocols allows more “natural” (human-like) communication and thus supports mixed-initiative dialogs. Furthermore, human-like communication allows us to unify machine-machine and human-machine interaction. This unification enables scenarios where a machine initiates a communication with communication partners without having to know whether the partners are machines or humans. A promising application domain for this kind of communication protocols will be ubiquitous computing, which offers a highly dynamic environment with ad-hoc networking.
The goal of the proposed project is a solution for a high-level communication platform based on ontologies. A new discourse ontology will be created for representing human communication theory. Moreover, we will define a declarative language based upon the discourse ontology and domain ontologies for describing the communication. We will build an engine that interprets this language for enabling the dialog. As a result, mixed-initiative interaction between machines and between humans and machines will be possible. Finally, we plan to provide rules for transforming specified communication scenarios into user interfaces based on a new rendering ontology, which contains statements about interaction objects and their relationships to the communicative acts.
The project is funded by FIT-IT and carried out by the Institute of Computer Technology (Vienna University of Technology) in close cooperation with PSE (Siemens).