Context ontology for smart healthcare systems

Abstract

This paper proposes an improved Context Ontology for Smart Healthcare Systems. The main contribution of this work is the simplification, sufficiently expressiveness, and extendability of the smart healthcare context representation, in which only three contextual classes are required—compared to several classes in the related context ontologies. This is achieved by adapting the feature-oriented domain analysis (FODA) techniques of software product line (SPL) for domain analysis, and subsequently, the lightweight unified process for ontology building (UPON Lite) is used for ontology development. To validate the applicability of the proposed context ontology, sustAGE smart healthcare case study is used. It is found that the proposed context ontology can be used to sense, reason, and infer context information in various users, environments, and smart healthcare services. The ontology is useful for healthcare service designers and developers who require simple and consolidated ontology for complex context representation. This paper will benefit the smart healthcare service developers, service requesters as well as other researchers in the ontology-based context modeling domain.