A core ontology on events for representing occurrences in the real world

Events are central aspect of many semantic ambient media applications such as surveillance, smart homes, automobiles, and others. Existing models for events typically do not follow a systematic development approach, are conceptually narrow with respect to event features, and their semantics is often ambiguous. This makes the communication between and integration of different event-based components and event-based semantic ambient media applications a challenging task. In this paper, we present the Event-Model-F, a formal model of events based on the foundational ontology DOLCE+DnS Ultralite (DUL). The Event-Model-F provides comprehensive support to represent time and space, objects and persons, mereological, causal, and correlative relationships between events, and different interpretations of the same event. It is developed following a pattern-oriented ontology design approach and can be easily extended by domain specific ontologies. We introduce the design and implementation of an application programming interface that allows for easy integration of the Event-Model-F in arbitrary applications. The use of the Event-Model-F is demonstrated at the example of a socio-technical system of emergency response and implemented in the SemaPlorer+ + application for creating and sharing event descriptions.

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