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

Personalized Context Based Services for Dynamic User Groups

This paper presents a novel approach to assist a group of users to access and control personalized context based services by means of natural interactions. Group creation and service activation are both based on the use of RFID tags. Each user can join a group by placing her personal tag on an RFID reader. Once the group has been created each available service, e.g. pictures slideshow, media player, recommender, can be activated and deactivated in various comfortable modes, such as through ‘service’ RFID tags or acting on a smart object. User preferences and context, along with the service catalog, are stored in a Context Aware Platform. The platform fuses the preferences and the contexts of the group members to custom tailor the services to the group’s dynamic profile