Towards Ontology-Based Formal Verification Methods for Context Aware Systems ⋆ Hedda R. Schmidtke and Woontack Woo ⋆⋆ GIST U-VR Lab., 500-712 Gwangju, South Korea {schmidtk,wwoo}@gist.ac.kr Abstract. Pervasive computing systems work within, and rely on, a model of the environment they operate in. In this respect, pervasive computing systems differ from other distributed and mobile comput- ing systems, and require new verification methods. A range of meth- ods and tools exist for verifying distributed and mobile concurrent sys- tems, and for checking consistency of ontology-based context models. As a tool for verifying current pervasive computing systems both are not optimal, since the former cover mainly tree-based location models, whereas the latter are not able to address the dynamic aspects of com- puting systems. We propose to formally describe pervasive computing systems as distributed concurrent systems operating on the background of a mereotopological context model. Keywords context modelling, mereotopology, program verification, on- tologies 1 Introduction Pervasive computing systems can be understood as distributed and mobile con- current computing systems that are able to react flexibly to changes in their physical environment [30]. A model of the environment is therefore a fundamen- tal part of a pervasive computing system, and research on context modelling methodology has led to novel data structures and ontologies for representing numerous aspects of context, such as location, time, social structure, computa- tional structure, and generally the physical properties of the environment. How- ever, current approaches to verification of pervasive computing systems [4, 27] based on Ambient Calculus [6] or the theory of Bigraphs [24] are focussed on tree-based location models, which are inappropriate to represent overlapping contexts, continuous domains of context, and continuous change. Ranganathan and Campbell [27] concluded that program verification and verification of con- text models are complementary tasks. However, important interactions exist and properties at the interface, where a process queries the context model or uses it to communicate information to other processes, should be verifiable [27]. ⋆ This research is supported by the UCN Project, the MIC 21st Century Frontier R&D Program in Korea. ⋆⋆ Corresponding author