A Design-phase Quality Model for Ubiquitous Service Ontology

Effective service description and modeling methodologies are essential for dynamic service composition to provide autonomous services for users in ubiquitous computing environments. In our previous research, we proposed a 'u-Service' as an abstract and structured concept for operations of devices in ubiquitous environments. In addition, we established the mechanism to structure u-Services as an ontology and the description specification to represent attributes of u-Services. However, it did not provide enough methods or standards to analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of the u-Service ontology in the design time. Since existing quality models for software products or computing systems cannot consider characteristics of ubiquitous services, they are not suitable for ubiquitous service ontology. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a quality evaluation model to design and modeling a good ubiquitous service ontology, based on our u-Service ontology building process. We extract modeling goals and evaluation indicators according to characteristics of ubiquitous service ontology, and establish quality metrics to quantify each quality sub-characteristics. The experiment result of the proposed quality evaluation model for u-Service ontologies which are constructed for our previous works shows that we can analyze the design of ubiquitous service ontology from various angles, and indicate recommendations for improvement.