Ontology Engineering for the Design and Implementation of Personal Pervasive Lifestyle Support

Abstract

The PAL project1 is developing an embodied conversational agent (robot and its avatar), and applications for child-agent activities that help children from 8 to 14 years old to acquire the required knowledge, skills, and attitude for adequate diabetes selfmanagement. Formal and informal caregivers can use the PAL system to enhance their supportive role for this self-management learning process. We are developing a common ontology (i) to support normative behavior in a flexible way, (ii) to establish mutual understanding in the human-agent system, (iii) to integrate and utilize knowledge from the application and scientific domains, and (iv) to produce sensible human-agent dialogues. The common ontology is constructed by relating and integrating partly existing separate ontologies that are specific to certain contexts or domains. This paper presents the general vision, approach, and state of the art.