Towards Ontology-Based Requirements Engineering for IoT-Supported Well-Being, Aging and Health

TL;DR

This paper extends an existing IoT ontology to better support requirements engineering for well-being, aging, and health, integrating domain concepts and sensor data semantics to improve system modeling.

Contribution

It proposes an ontology extension for well-being, aging, and health, aligning existing models with new domain concepts and requirements for IoT applications.

Findings

Extended SAREF4EHAW ontology with new attributes and relations

Developed a taxonomy and conceptual framework for well-being, aging, and health

Updated use cases and ontological requirements for IoT-based health systems

Abstract

Ontologies serve as a one of the formal means to represent and model knowledge in computer science, electrical engineering, system engineering and other related disciplines. Ontologies within requirements engineering may be used for formal representation of system requirements. In the Internet of Things, ontologies may be used to represent sensor knowledge and describe acquired data semantics. Designing an ontology comprehensive enough with an appropriate level of knowledge expressiveness, serving multiple purposes, from system requirements specifications to modeling knowledge based on data from IoT sensors, is one of the great challenges. This paper proposes an approach towards ontology-based requirements engineering for well-being, aging and health supported by the Internet of Things. Such an ontology design does not aim at creating a new ontology, but extending the appropriate one already existing, SAREF4EHAW, in order align with the well-being, aging and health concepts and structure the knowledge within the domain. Other contributions include a conceptual formulation for Well-Being, Aging and Health and a related taxonomy, as well as a concept of One Well-Being, Aging and Health. New attributes and relations have been proposed for the new ontology extension, along with the updated list of use cases and particular ontological requirements not covered by the original ontology. Future work envisions full specification of the new ontology extension, as well as structuring system requirements and sensor measurement parameters to follow description logic.