An Ontology for Unified Modeling of Tasks, Actions, Environments, and Capabilities in Personal Service Robotics

Personal service robots are increasingly used in domestic settings to assist older adults and people requiring support. Effective operation involves not only physical interaction but also the ability to interpret dynamic environments, understand tasks, and choose appropriate actions based on context. This requires integrating both hardware components (e.g. sensors, actuators) and software systems capable of reasoning about tasks, environments, and robot capabilities. Frameworks such as the Robot Operating System (ROS) provide open-source tools that help connect low-level hardware with higher-level functionalities. However, real-world deployments remain tightly coupled to specific platforms. As a result, solutions are often isolated and hard-coded, limiting interoperability, reusability, and knowledge sharing. Ontologies and knowledge graphs offer a structured way to represent tasks, environments, and robot capabilities. Existing ontologies, such as the Socio-physical Model of Activities (SOMA) and the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE), provide models for activities, spatial relationships, and reasoning structures. However, they often focus on specific domains and do not fully capture the connection between environment, action, robot capabilities, and system-level integration. In this work, we propose the Ontology for roBOts and acTions (OntoBOT), which extends existing ontologies to provide a unified representation of tasks, actions, environments, and capabilities. Our contributions are twofold: (1) we unify these aspects into a cohesive ontology to support formal reasoning about task execution, and (2) we demonstrate its generalizability by evaluating competency questions across four embodied agents - TIAGo, HSR, UR3, and Stretch - showing how OntoBOT enables context-aware reasoning, task-oriented execution, and knowledge sharing in service robotics.

Text classification of column headers with a controlled vocabulary: leveraging LLMs for metadata enrichment

Traditional dataset retrieval systems index on metadata information rather than on the data values. Thus relying primarily on manual annotations and high-quality metadata, processes known to be labour-intensive and challenging to automate. We propose a method to support metadata enrichment with topic annotations of column headers using three Large Language Models (LLMs): ChatGPT-3.5, GoogleBard and GoogleGemini. We investigate the LLMs ability to classify column headers based on domain-specific topics from a controlled vocabulary. We evaluate our approach by assessing the internal consistency of the LLMs, the inter-machine alignment, and the human-machine agreement for the topic classification task. Additionally, we investigate the impact of contextual information (i.e. dataset description) on the classification outcomes. Our results suggest that ChatGPT and GoogleGemini outperform GoogleBard for internal consistency as well as LLM-human-alignment. Interestingly, we found that context had no impact on the LLMs performances. This work proposes a novel approach that leverages LLMs for text classification using a controlled topic vocabulary, which has the potential to facilitate automated metadata enrichment, thereby enhancing dataset retrieval and the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability (FAIR) of research data on the Web.