The OASIS Objectives

OASIS is a Large Scale Integrated Project with the aim to develop an open and innovative reference architecture, based upon ontologies and semantic services, that will allow plug and play and cost-effective interconnection of existing and new services in all domains required for the independent and autonomous living of the elderly and their enhanced Quality of Life.

OASIS targeted domains are:

• Independent Living Applications, including socialisation.
• Mobility Applications.
• Smart Workplaces Applications.

Figure: OASIS targeted domains

The main objectives of the OASIS Project can be classified in social, scientific & technological and economical. They are listed below per area.

Social Objectives

a. To coordinate and support a set of innovative applications to foster the independent living of the elderly and delay his/her usual aging negative health and quality of life effects. It will include different techniques for supporting the elderly, such as monitoring, coaching, motivation, action compliance, etc.

b. To attack the problem of elderly users’ social isolation, by creating enhanced web and collaborative web experiences involving elderly user communities.

c. To coordinate and support a set of innovative applications to enable the autonomous mobility and enhance the work-ability of the elderly, in order to keep them really integrated in the social life and not live marginally in their own “island” or “golden cage”.

Offered services will be personalised, adapted to the profile of the users, to their preferences and to their health status.

They will include:

Independent Living Applications (ILA) such as Nutritional advisor, Activity coach, Brain trainer, Social relationship, Health monitoring and Environmental control;

Autonomous mobility and smart workplaces applications (AMSWA) such as Elderly-friendly transport, Elderly-friendly route guidance, Personal Mobility, Tourism – leisure and Smart Workplaces.

Scientific and Technological Objectives

OASIS aims to provide relevant innovations over the state-of-the art in areas such as :

• Open Reference Architecture and Ontologies,
• Intelligent Agents and AMI Framework,
• Wearable sensors for elderly health and activity monitoring,
• In-home and Domotic Sensors,
• Independent Living Applications and Autonomous Mobility and Smart Workplaces Applications.

The OASIS development will provide an open source complementary solution to the direction now being pursued in the Semantic Web approach to ontology design: whereas in the Sematic Web re-usability is pursued across open ontologies, the OASIS solution will show how re-usability can be achieved following the tried and tested results of decades of practical experience in software engineering.

Crucially, the open Semantic Web approach entails that small local modules may have global side-effects (for example, by changing class membership); in contrast, the OASIS hyper-ontology will demonstrate how interoperability can be achieved within strict modularity. Side-effects in software design are a source of major system instability, development and maintenance costs—avoiding them for ontology design will therefore be a major innovative contribution of considerable benefit.

In Intelligent Agents and AMI Framework OASIS introduces architecture concepts already presented mainly in B2B computing (e.g. Web Services) for application in software agent technology. Putting the effort in standardizing the agent functionality description in a publicly agreed language (as it is done with Web Services and WSDL for example) is at least an interesting research direction towards combining the flexibility and effectiveness of agent computing with the interoperability capabilities of Web Services. Since heterogeneity in software systems is all about flexibility and interoperability we strongly believe to achieve both developing based on the aforementioned ideas.

In Independent Living Applications and in the Autonomous Mobility and Smart Workplaces Applications, OASIS – taking into account all previous researches – proposes an innovative approach of integration of many applications through the use of a common set interconnected ontologies i.e. not on single service layer but on the ontology layer. OASIS will represent a new paradigm in the service area, offering the combined benefits of “Linux-like” open development and updated framework with a “Wikipedia-like” expansion policy, which however is controlled, promoted and updated by the OASIS Industrial Forum even beyond the lifetime of the project.

Moreover OASIS aspires to advance the state of the art in the field of Smart Workplaces environments and Work-ability of the elderly in directions such as support and flexible working models, secure access to any data required for work and smart workplace adapted to elderly needs.

In Wearable Sensors and Activity Monitoring the most significant innovation in OASIS is the “multi sensor approach” performing a data fusion of various sensor inputs, combined with expert knowledge and individual user information in the framework of the OASIS hyper-ontology. As a result the elderly user obtains comprehensive individual information.

In the context of Interfaces and Adaptive Systems OASIS aims to provide high quality, ambient user interfaces, by effectively addressing diversity in dimensions such as changing abilities due to ageing, categories of delivered services and applications and deployment computing-platforms and devices (i.e. PDAs, smart-phones, desktops, laptops).

Economical Objectives

Economical objectives include:

a. To measure the users and key stakeholders of the OASIS applications and services to estimate their cost effectiveness and exploitation prospects.

b. To make available the OASIS Open Reference Architecture and related tools as open source, following a “wikipedia-like” maintenance approach, thus enabling its further expansion and uptake by large industrial players and SMEs.

c. To formulate business scenarios and exploitation plans that guarantee the market success and viability of OASIS applications and the promotion into standards of its reference architecture.

ICT for ageing well can become a driver for jobs and growth and a successful lead market for Europe.

The users of smart home applications is expected to triple by 2020, from 13 to 37 million people ; the users of products and services aimed at age-related impairment are expected to reach 84 million people by 2020.

The OASIS Project is designed such as measurement of progress against objectives will be performed at various times during the project execution. Furthermore detailed and quantifiable indicators per project WP, per milestone, per SP and for the project as whole were defined.