Activity Ontologies for Intelligent Calendar Applications

Abstract

Intelligent Calendar Applications (ICA) have recently emerged as a very promising target field for Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, since calendar applications are used daily by millions of people world-wide. ICAs built on traditional electronic calendars, by empowering them with efficient scheduling engines, being able to schedule and reschedule a user’s events within its calendar. However, in order to fully exploit the dynamics of an ICA, the user has to describe his events with much more detail than with a traditional electronic calendar, in order for the scheduler to have all the necessary information, that is, attribute values, constraints and preferences, to schedule the events. Existing XML based formats to describe events, such as iCalendar, do not provide enough context for the information needed in order to describe a rich event, to be used by an ICA. In this paper we present three ontologies that have been designed to be used by modern ICAs, in order to exchange information about events between ICAs and event providers. The ontologies have been designed in order to describe the event, its temporal aspects, as well as the user’s constraints and preferences.