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

Federated Embedded Systems – a review of the literature in related fields

This report is concerned with the vision of smart interconnected objects, a vision that has attracted much attention lately. In this paper, embedded, interconnected, open, and heterogeneous control systems are in focus, formally referred to as Federated Embedded Systems. To place FES into a context, a review of some related research directions is presented. This review includes such concepts as systems of systems, cyber-physical systems, ubiquitous computing, internet of things, and multi-agent systems. Interestingly, the reviewed fields seem to overlap with each other in an increasing number of ways

Towards FollowMe User Profiles for Macro Intelligent Environments

We envision an Ambient Intelligent Environment as an environment with technology embedded within the framework of that environment to help enhance an users experience in that environment. Existing implementations , while working effectively, are themselves an expensive and time consuming investment. Applying the same expertise to an environment on a monolithic scale is very inefficient, and thus, will require a different approach. In this paper, we present this problem, propose theoretical solutions that would solve this problem, with the guise of experimentally verifying and comparing these approaches, as well as a formal method to model the entire scenario

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

ANGELAH: A Framework for Assisting Elders At Home

The ever growing percentage of elderly people within modern societies poses welfare systems under relevant stress. In fact, partial and progressive loss of motor, sensorial, and/or cognitive skills renders elders unable to live autonomously, eventually leading to their hospitalization. This results in both relevant emotional and economic costs. Ubiquitous computing technologies can offer interesting opportunities for in-house safety and autonomy. However, existing systems partially address in-house safety requirements and typically focus on only elder monitoring and emergency detection. The paper presents ANGELAH, a middleware-level solution integrating both ”elder monitoring and emergency detection” solutions and networking solutions. ANGELAH has two main features: i) it enables efficient integration between a variety of sensors and actuators deployed at home for emergency detection and ii) provides a solid framework for creating and managing rescue teams composed of individuals willing to promptly assist elders in case of emergency situations. A prototype of ANGELAH, designed for a case study for helping elders with vision impairments, is developed and interesting results are obtained from both computer simulations and a real-network testbed

A Trust-based Secure Service Discovery (TSSD) Model for Pervasive Computing

To cope with the challenges posed by device capacity and capability, and also the nature of ad hoc networks, a Service discovery model is needed that can resolve security and privacy issues with simple solutions. The use of complex algorithms and powerful fixed infrastructure is infeasible due to the volatile nature of pervasive environment and tiny pervasive devices. In this paper, we present a trust-based secure Service discovery model, TSSD (trust-based secure service discovery) for a truly pervasive environment. Our model is a hybrid one that allows both secure and non-secure discovery of services. This model allows Service discovery and sharing based on mutual trust. The security model handles the communication and service sharing security issues. TSSD also incorporates a trust mode for sharing Services with unknown devices

Services in pervasive computing environments : from design to delivery

The work presented in this thesis is based on the assumption that modern computer technologies are already potentially pervasive: CPUs are embedded in any sort of device; RAM and storage memory of a modern PDA is comparable to those of a ten years ago Unix workstation; Wi-Fi, GPRS, UMTS are leveraging the development of the wireless Internet. Nevertheless, computing is not pervasive because we do not have a clear conceptual model of the pervasive computer and we have not tools, methodologies, and middleware to write and to seamlessly deliver at once services over a multitude of heterogeneous devices and different delivery contexts. Our thesis addresses these issues starting from the analysis of forces in a pervasive computing environment: user mobility, user profile, user position, and device profile. The conceptual model, or metaphor, we use to drive our work is to consider the environment as surrounded by a multitude of services and objects and devices as the communicating gates between the real world and the virtual dimension of pervasive computing around us. Our thesis is thus built upon three main “pillars”. The first pillar is a domain-object-driven methodology which allows developer to abstract from low level details of the final delivery platform, and provides the user with the ability to access services in a multi-channel way. The rationale is that domain objects are self-contained pieces of software able to represent data and to compute functions and procedures. Our approach fills the gap between users and domain objects building an appropriate user interface which is both adapted to the domain object and to the end user device. As example, we present how to design, implement and deliver an electronic mail application over various platforms. The second pillar of this thesis analyzes in more details the forces that make direct object manipulation inadequate in a pervasive context. These forces are the user profile, the device profile, the context of use, and the combinatorial explosion of domain objects. From the analysis of the electronic mail application presented as example, we notice that according to the end user device, or according to particular circumstances during the access to the service (for instance if the user access the service by the interactive TV while he is having his breakfast) some functionalities are not compulsory and do not fit an adequate task sequence. So we decided to make task models explicit in the design of a service and to integrate the capability to automatically generate user interfaces for domain objects with the formal definition of task models adapted to the final delivery context. Finally, the third pillar of our thesis is about the lifecycle of services in a pervasive computing environment. Our solutions are based upon an existing framework, the Jini connection technology, and enrich this framework with new services and architectures for the deployment and discovery of services, for the user session management, and for the management of offline agents