Interfacing ambient electronics with nature
The emerging 'disappearing computer' initiative has already gained wide acceptance in many fields involving closed settings, such as a house, an office or a lab. Yet, little effort has been made to bring ambient intelligence in open spaces, that is, closer to nature. As a result interfaces to nature have not previously been developed to any extent, with plants and other living organisms being thought of as inert within the space. Urged by this, the PLANTS project focused on developing synergies between living organisms (other than humans) and ambient systems. Narrowing the scope to plant life, project work investigated methods and advanced technology for creating suitable interfaces between artefacts and plants. Consequently, the project results may enable people to form mixed, interacting communities. One of the key project results involved the development of the PLANTS ontology tool for the organisation of the knowledge of the PLANTS system. The tool's architecture comprises the PLANTS Core Ontology for encoding general knowledge and the PLANTS Higher Ontology for encoding application-specific knowledge. Knowledge can be distinguished in major themes, including conceptualisation of the bioGadgetWorlds, characterisation of plants and sensor/actuator systems as well as definition of rules. BioGadgetWorlds is a mixed society where communication between plants and artefacts is managed. Elaboration of the bioGadgetWorlds knowledge could also facilitate its use by other systems. The conceptualisation feature of the PLANTS Ontology guarantees semantic interoperability among eEntities and sustains a service-discovery mechanism. Furthermore, the tool supports the decision-making process, which is one of the key features of the PLANTS system. Special provision was made so that the tool is capable of gaining new knowledge through detailed specifications of a machine learning process. For example, knowledge of the plant's photosynthetic process would allow determination of optimal growing conditions.
