31,344 research outputs found
A study of existing Ontologies in the IoT-domain
Several domains have adopted the increasing use of IoT-based devices to
collect sensor data for generating abstractions and perceptions of the real
world. This sensor data is multi-modal and heterogeneous in nature. This
heterogeneity induces interoperability issues while developing cross-domain
applications, thereby restricting the possibility of reusing sensor data to
develop new applications. As a solution to this, semantic approaches have been
proposed in the literature to tackle problems related to interoperability of
sensor data. Several ontologies have been proposed to handle different aspects
of IoT-based sensor data collection, ranging from discovering the IoT sensors
for data collection to applying reasoning on the collected sensor data for
drawing inferences. In this paper, we survey these existing semantic ontologies
to provide an overview of the recent developments in this field. We highlight
the fundamental ontological concepts (e.g., sensor-capabilities and
context-awareness) required for an IoT-based application, and survey the
existing ontologies which include these concepts. Based on our study, we also
identify the shortcomings of currently available ontologies, which serves as a
stepping stone to state the need for a common unified ontology for the IoT
domain.Comment: Submitted to Elsevier JWS SI on Web semantics for the Internet/Web of
Thing
Proximal business intelligence on the semantic web
This is the post-print version of this article. The official version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2010 Springer.Ubiquitous information systems (UBIS) extend current Information System thinking to explicitly differentiate technology between devices and software components with relation to people and process. Adapting business data and management information to support specific user actions in context is an ongoing topic of research. Approaches typically focus on providing mechanisms to
improve specific information access and transcoding but not on how the information
can be accessed in a mobile, dynamic and ad-hoc manner. Although web ontology has been used to facilitate the loading of data warehouses, less research has been carried out on ontology based mobile reporting. This paper explores how business data can be modeled and accessed using the web ontology
language and then re-used to provide the invisibility of pervasive access; uncovering
more effective architectural models for adaptive information system strategies of this type. This exploratory work is guided in part by a vision of business intelligence that is highly distributed, mobile and fluid, adapting to sensory understanding of the underlying environment in which it operates. A proof-of concept mobile and ambient data access architecture is developed in order to further test the viability of such an approach. The paper concludes with an ontology engineering framework for systems of this type – named UBIS-ONTO
Enabling Machine Understandable Exchange of Energy Consumption Information in Intelligent Domotic Environments
In the 21st century, all the major countries around the world are coming together to reduce the impact of energy generation and consumption on the global environment. Energy conservation and its efficient usage has become a top agenda on the desks of many governments. In the last decade, the drive to make homes automated and to deliver a better assisted living picked pace and the research into home automation systems accelerated, usually based on a centralized residential gateway. However most devised solutions fail to provide users with information about power consumption of different house appliances. The ability to collect power consumption information can lead us to have a more energy efficient society. The goal addressed in this paper is to enable residential gateways to provide the energy consumption information, in a machine understandable format, to support third party applications and services. To reach this goal, we propose a Semantic Energy Information Publishing Framework. The proposed framework publishes, for different appliances in the house, their power consumption information and other properties, in a machine understandable format. Appliance properties are exposed according to the existing semantic modeling supported by residential gateways, while instantaneous power consumption is modeled through a new modular Energy Profile ontolog
Integration of Legacy Appliances into Home Energy Management Systems
The progressive installation of renewable energy sources requires the
coordination of energy consuming devices. At consumer level, this coordination
can be done by a home energy management system (HEMS). Interoperability issues
need to be solved among smart appliances as well as between smart and
non-smart, i.e., legacy devices. We expect current standardization efforts to
soon provide technologies to design smart appliances in order to cope with the
current interoperability issues. Nevertheless, common electrical devices affect
energy consumption significantly and therefore deserve consideration within
energy management applications. This paper discusses the integration of smart
and legacy devices into a generic system architecture and, subsequently,
elaborates the requirements and components which are necessary to realize such
an architecture including an application of load detection for the
identification of running loads and their integration into existing HEM
systems. We assess the feasibility of such an approach with a case study based
on a measurement campaign on real households. We show how the information of
detected appliances can be extracted in order to create device profiles
allowing for their integration and management within a HEMS
Identifying the time profile of everyday activities in the home using smart meter data
Activities are a descriptive term for the common ways households spend their time. Examples include cooking, doing laundry, or socialising. Smart meter data can be used to generate time profiles of activities that are meaningful to households’ own lived experience. Activities are therefore a lens through which energy feedback to households can be made salient and understandable. This paper demonstrates a multi-step methodology for inferring hourly time profiles of ten household activities using smart meter data, supplemented by individual appliance plug monitors and environmental sensors. First, household interviews, video ethnography, and technology surveys are used to identify appliances and devices in the home, and their roles in specific activities. Second, ‘ontologies’ are developed to map out the relationships between activities and technologies in the home. One or more technologies may indicate the occurrence of certain activities. Third, data from smart meters, plug monitors and sensor data are collected. Smart meter data measuring aggregate electricity use are disaggregated and processed together with the plug monitor and sensor data to identify when and for how long different activities are occurring. Sensor data are particularly useful for activities that are not always associated with an energy-using device. Fourth, the ontologies are applied to the disaggregated data to make inferences on hourly time profiles of ten everyday activities. These include washing, doing laundry, watching TV (reliably inferred), and cleaning, socialising, working (inferred with uncertainties). Fifth, activity time diaries and structured interviews are used to validate both the ontologies and the inferred activity time profiles. Two case study homes are used to illustrate the methodology using data collected as part of a UK trial of smart home technologies. The methodology is demonstrated to produce reliable time profiles of a range of domestic activities that are meaningful to households. The methodology also emphasises the value of integrating coded interview and video ethnography data into both the development of the activity inference process
Service-oriented Context-aware Framework
Location- and context-aware services are emerging technologies in mobile and
desktop environments, however, most of them are difficult to use and do not
seem to be beneficial enough. Our research focuses on designing and creating a
service-oriented framework that helps location- and context-aware,
client-service type application development and use. Location information is
combined with other contexts such as the users' history, preferences and
disabilities. The framework also handles the spatial model of the environment
(e.g. map of a room or a building) as a context. The framework is built on a
semantic backend where the ontologies are represented using the OWL description
language. The use of ontologies enables the framework to run inference tasks
and to easily adapt to new context types. The framework contains a
compatibility layer for positioning devices, which hides the technical
differences of positioning technologies and enables the combination of location
data of various sources
- …