Visualisation of semantic architectural information within a game engine environment

Because of the importance of graphics and information within the domain of architecture, engineering and construction (AEC), an appropriate combination of visualisation technology and information management technology is of utter importance in the development of appropriately supporting design and construction applications. We therefore started an investigation of two of the newest developments in these domains, namely game engine technology and semantic web technology. This paper documents part of this research, containing a review and comparison of the most prominent game engines and documenting our architectural semantic web. A short test-case illustrates how both can be combined to enhance information visualisation for architectural design and construction

Meetings and Meeting Modeling in Smart Environments

In this paper we survey our research on smart meeting rooms and its relevance for augmented reality meeting support and virtual reality generation of meetings in real time or off-line. The research reported here forms part of the European 5th and 6th framework programme projects multi-modal meeting manager (M4) and augmented multi-party interaction (AMI). Both projects aim at building a smart meeting environment that is able to collect multimodal captures of the activities and discussions in a meeting room, with the aim to use this information as input to tools that allow real-time support, browsing, retrieval and summarization of meetings. Our aim is to research (semantic) representations of what takes place during meetings in order to allow generation, e.g. in virtual reality, of meeting activities (discussions, presentations, voting, etc.). Being able to do so also allows us to look at tools that provide support during a meeting and at tools that allow those not able to be physically present during a meeting to take part in a virtual way. This may lead to situations where the differences between real meeting participants, human-controlled virtual participants and (semi-) autonomous virtual participants disappear

Modeling an ontology on accessible evacuation routes for emergencies

Providing alert communication in emergency situations is vital to reduce the number of victims. However, this is a challenging goal for researchers and professionals due to the diverse pool of prospective users, e.g. people with disabilities as well as other vulnerable groups. Moreover, in the event of an emergency situation, many people could become vulnerable because of exceptional circumstances such as stress, an unknown environment or even visual impairment (e.g. fire causing smoke). Within this scope, a crucial activity is to notify affected people about safe places and available evacuation routes. In order to address this need, we propose to extend an ontology, called SEMA4A (Simple EMergency Alert 4 [for] All), developed in a previous work for managing knowledge about accessibility guidelines, emergency situations and communication technologies. In this paper, we introduce a semi-automatic technique for knowledge acquisition and modeling on accessible evacuation routes. We introduce a use case to show applications of the ontology and conclude with an evaluation involving several experts in evacuation procedures. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Ontological Context-Awareness for Adaptive Augmented Reality

This paper presents a proposal for supporting daily user needs by simple interactions with the environment through an augmented-reality perspective and applying proactive adaptation through knowledge representation using ontologies. The proposed architecture (i-ARA) makes use of principles of Semantic Web that endow context-awareness and user personalization. In addition, this kind of services allows the supervision and management of what is happening at the environment and, in consequence, to improve information offered to users. The architecture has been used to implement applications using iPhone technology and applied to illustrative scenarios.This paper presents a proposal for supporting daily user needs by simple interactions with the environment through an augmented-reality perspective and applying proactive adaptation through knowledge representation using ontologies. The proposed architecture (i-ARA) makes use of principles of Semantic Web that endow context-awareness and user personalization. In addition, this kind of services allows the supervision and management of what is happening at the environment and, in consequence, to improve information offered to users. The architecture has been used to implement applications using iPhone technology and applied to illustrative scenarios

Achieving Adaptive Augmented Reality through Ontological Context-Awareness applied to AAL Scenarios

This paper presents a proposal for supporting daily user needs by simple interactions with the environment through an augmented-reality perspective that applies proactive adaptation through knowledge representation using ontologies. The proposed architecture (i-ARA) uses principles of the Semantic Web that endow context-awareness and user personalization. In addition, these types of services allow the supervision and management of what is happening in the environment and, consequently, improve the information offered to users. The architecture has been used to implement applications using iPhone technology and has been applied to illustrative scenarios, including Ambient Assisted Living.This paper presents a proposal for supporting daily user needs by simple interactions with the environment through an augmented-reality perspective that applies proactive adaptation through knowledge representation using ontologies. The proposed architecture (i-ARA) uses principles of the Semantic Web that endow context-awareness and user personalization. In addition, these types of services allow the supervision and management of what is happening in the environment and, consequently, improve the information offered to users. The architecture has been used to implement applications using iPhone technology and has been applied to illustrative scenarios, including Ambient Assisted Living