An Integrated Framework to Achieve Interoperability in Person-Centric Health Management

The need for high-quality out-of-hospital healthcare is a known socioeconomic problem. Exploiting ICT's evolution, ad-hoc telemedicine solutions have been proposed in the past. Integrating such ad-hoc solutions in order to cost-effectively support the entire healthcare cycle is still a research challenge. In order to handle the heterogeneity of relevant information and to overcome the fragmentation of out-of-hospital instrumentation in person-centric healthcare systems, a shared and open source interoperability component can be adopted, which is ontology driven and based on the semantic web data model. The feasibility and the advantages of the proposed approach are demonstrated by presenting the use case of real-time monitoring of patients' health and their environmental context

RedSib: A smart-M3 semantic information broker implementation

Smart-M3 is an open source middleware solution originally released by Nokia as a prototype reference infrastructure to support context-aware ontology-driven smart applications. This paper proposes a renewedSmart-M3 Semantic Information Broker implementation with increased performance and usability levels. In the proposed solution many features have been added or modified, preserving compatibility with the previous release. The major changes are related to the subscription mechanism, the RDF store and the supported encodings for information representation and query. SPARQL query language replaces Wilbur. This paper enlightens the analysis carried out on the original implementation and discusses the choices made to increase its maturity level. The work done is a step forward towards a stable and efficient open interoperability platform for the emerging market of smart space based services

Trends and Gaps in Ontology-Supported Environmental Health

Environmental Health (EH) refers to aspects of human health affectedby factors in the environment, e.g., biological factors, andit is an essential part of any comprehensive public health system.Similar to other health-related fields, one observes an increasingmovement in the adoption of IoT technologies into the EH domain.Regarding the data life cycle in IoT systems, data modeling andinterpretation are crucial tasks in which ontologies are a feasiblesolution because of their expressiveness and reasoning support.In this paper, we structure the ontology-supported EH researchtheme through a systematic literature mapping. The identificationand selection strategies of primary studies include the automaticsearch for studies published from 2010 to 2019 on five sourcesand the application of inclusion and exclusion criteria on an eighthundred-eleven-distinct-paper group. The results of this originalwork provide an overview of the research theme with multipleclassifications of thirty-four relevant studies remaining as well asthe finding of trends and gaps for future work

The M3 architecture for smart spaces: Overview of semantic information broker implementations

A smart space enhances a networked computing environment by enabling information sharing for a multitude of local digital devices and global resources from the Internet. We consider the M3 architecture (multi-device, multi-vendor, multi-domain) for creating smart spaces, which integrates technologies from two innovative concepts: the Semantic Web and the Internet of Things. Our research focus is on analyses of the capabilities of Smart-M3 platform, which provides software implementations for such a central element of an M3 smart space as Semantic Information Broker (SIB). The paper presents a state-of-the-art and contributes our systematized vision on the SIB design and implementation. The analyzed open source SIB implementations include the original Smart-M3 piglet-based SIB, its optimized descendant RedSIB, OSGi SIB for Java devices, pySIB for Python devices, and CuteSIB for Qt devices. We also analyze the design of proprietary or incomplete SIB implementations: RIBS for embedded devices and ADK SIB built upon the OSGi framework with integration in the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment. The theoretical study is augmented with experimental evaluation of available SIB implementations

Semantic Service Architectures for Smart Environments

Many industries and academic institutions share the vision that an appropriate use of information originated from the environment may add value to services in multiple domains and may help humans in dealing with the growing information overload which often seems to jeopardize our life. It is also clear that information sharing and mutual understanding between software agents may impact complex processes where many actors (humans and machines) are involved, leading to relevant socioeconomic benefits. Starting from these two input, architectural and technological solutions to enable “environment-related cooperative digital services” are here explored. The proposed analysis starts from the consideration that our environment is physical space and here diversity is a major value. On the other side diversity is detrimental to common technological solutions, and it is an obstacle to mutual understanding. An appropriate environment abstraction and a shared information model are needed to provide the required levels of interoperability in our heterogeneous habitat. This thesis reviews several approaches to support environment related applications and intends to demonstrate that smart-space-based, ontology-driven, information-sharing platforms may become a flexible and powerful solution to support interoperable services in virtually any domain and even in cross-domain scenarios. It also shows that semantic technologies can be fruitfully applied not only to represent application domain knowledge. For example semantic modeling of Human-Computer Interaction may support interaction interoperability and transformation of interaction primitives into actions, and the thesis shows how smart-space-based platforms driven by an interaction ontology may enable natural ad flexible ways of accessing resources and services, e.g, with gestures. An ontology for computational flow execution has also been built to represent abstract computation, with the goal of exploring new ways of scheduling computation flows with smart-space-based semantic platforms

A Smart Space Application to Dynamically Relate Medical and Environmental Information

This paper presents a cross-domain application for ambient and health monitoring. The system architecture is intended to be openly extensible in order to fulfil unanticipated needs. Our implementation addresses several user groups, from those requiring heart related monitoring, which could be dependent on the environmental conditions, to those who need to maximize environmental comfort under specified energy consumption constraints. In this application the ambient information is used to nrich the biomedical data and provide a more complete picture to the information consumers, such as doctors and building superintendents. The cross-domain nature of the scenario requires data interoperability, which is ensured by a shared Smart Space. The Smart Space represents the information in Resource Description Framework and its semantics are ontology driven. A simple ontology for the addressed information domain is also presented. The Smart Space platform is provided by the JTI Artemis SOFIA project