Towards a lightweight mobile semantic-based approach for enhancing interaction with smart objects

This work describes a semantic extension for a user-smart object interaction model based on the ECA paradigm (Event-Condition-Action). In this approach, smart objects publish their sensing (event) and action capabilities in the cloud and mobile devices are prepared to retrieve them and act as mediators to configure personalized behaviours for the objects. In this paper, the information handled by this interaction system has been shaped according several semantic models that, together with the integration of an embedded ontological and rule-based reasoner, are exploited in order to (i) automatically detect incompatible ECA rules configurations and to (ii) support complex ECA rules definitions and execution. This semantic extension may significantly improve the management of smart spaces populated with numerous smart objects from mobile personal devices, as it facilitates the configuration of coherent ECA rules

Policy-based Access Control in Mobile Social Ecosystems

International audienceThe novel scenarios enabled by emerging mobile social applications raise serious concerns regarding access control of users' contextual and social data. Given the variety of existing and upcoming social applications, it is important to provide (i) generic yet flexible policy models that combine expressivity with personalization, (ii) actual running infrastructures to en- force policy-based access control on heterogenous devices with minimal development/deployment effort, and (iii) user-interfaces to allow the easy specification of policies without dealing with the complexity of the underlying policy and data models. Toward this goal, in this paper we make three contributions. First, we present a novel policy framework for controlling access to social data in mobile applications. The framework allows the representation of expressive policies based on users' social interactions, which can be easily extended with new domain data models, while keeping policy model compatibility intact. Secondly, we demonstrate how we integrated the policy framework as part of Yarta, a middleware for managing mobile users' social ecosystems, implemented and deployed on laptops and smart phones. Third, we show the graphical policy editor provided with the policy framework to allow non-technology savvy users to easily specify and manage their access control policies