Intelligent Calendar Applications: A Holistic Framework based on Ontologies

Abstract

With the term ‘Intelligent Calendar Application’ we refer to traditional electronic calendars empowered with scheduling engines and rich information about events, in order to be able to automatically schedule the events in time and space. The additional event-related information that is necessary to automate the scheduling process includes temporal domain, duration range, feasible locations, constraints and preferences over the way the events are scheduled, etc. Asking the user to provide all this information for each event would render intelligent calendars less attractive compared to traditional calendars. In order to overcome this limitation, we have recently proposed the use of general ontologies to describe any kind of everyday human activity. In this article we extend our work in three ways: (a) by extending the general ontologies with domain ontologies, particularly, an ontology to describe activities related with participating in scientific conferences; (b) by integrating these ontologies within a deployed intelligent calendar application; and (c) by developing a module to automatically extract ontological activity descriptions from web pages of scientific conferences. In this way, we propose a holistic framework concerning the integration of ontologies within intelligent calendar applications, comprising information modelling, gathering and integration.