SMART-M3 v.0.9: A semantic event processing engine supporting information level interoperability in ambient intelligence

This tutorial is addressed to all students in Electronic Engineering and Information Engineering at the Scuola di Ingegneria e Architettura of the University of Bologna attending the following courses: Laboratory of Interoperability of Embedded Systems, "Calcolatori Elettronici M" and "Attività Progettuale di Calcolatori Elettronici M". This tutorial includes the guidelines to build distributed applications where clients may interact with physical space. Inter-client interaction occurs through a semantic event processing engine. Information interoperability is based on a shared knowledge representation model named ontology. This tutorial is focused on client design and on the SPARQL primitives that provide the means for client-event processing engine interaction

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

SWAMP:Smart Water Management Platform Overview and Security Challenges

The intensive use of technology in precision irrigation for agriculture is getting momentum in order to optimize the use of water, reduce the energy consumption and improve the quality of crops. Internet of Things (IoT) and other technologies are the natural choices for smart water management applications, and the SWAMP project is expected to prove the appropriateness of IoT in real settings with the deployment of on-site pilots. At the same time, the more intense the use of technology is, agriculture turns new security risks, which may affect both crop development and the commodities market. A security breach may irreversibly compromise a crop and data eavesdropping may compromise price and contracts exposing sensitive data such crop quality, development or management. This paper discusses security challenges and technologies for the application of IoT in agriculture and indicates that one of the most relevant challenges to be handled in SWAMP project is dealing with the multitude of behaviors from IoT application and what would be considered as normal and what would be considered as a threat

A web of things approach for indoor position monitoring of elderly and impaired people

Helping, assisting and taking care of the elderly and of impaired people is one of the greatest challenges in our society. Within this paper, we propose a new approach for indoor position monitoring of people, aiming to identify in real time dangerous situations. In order to boost interoperability and continuous adaptation of the devices used, a Web Of Things based solution will be proposed and evaluated. Our contribution, in particular, consists of a portable and user friendly Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) reader exploiting monopulse radar and beam-steering capabilities. Such hardware, exploiting a set of software modules, will be located in an environment easily accessible and extensible to a growing number of devices. The application will be the result of the cooperation between software and hardware, eventually outlining a real and completely flexible Web Of Things environment

Development of collaborative editing applications through semantic publish-subscribe platforms

Cloud computing revolutionized the way resources (i.e. services and data) are accessed and used. Among the many changes in data processing and service provision paradigms, Software as a Service (SaaS) and collaborative editing are two of the most significant. This paper presents an approach based on semantic publish/subscribe paradigm to the development of collaborative editing applications. The main aim of this research work consists in exploiting emerging technologies (i.e. semantic web data representation formalisms, publish-subscribe platforms) in order to (1) overcome limitations coming from the traditional paradigm of single-author workflows, (2) enhance the editing capabilities of the users, (3) ease the development and maintainment of applications and (4) provide a shared high- level abstraction of the documents that fosters information-level interoperability and reusability. The proposed approach is then validated through an ad-hoc vector graphics application, SCEd (Semantic Collaborative Editor) built upon a SPARQL Event Processing Architecture derived from the Smart-M3 semantic publish-subscribe platform

From Heterogeneous Sensor Networks to Integrated Software Services: Design and Implementation of a Semantic Architecture for the Internet of Things at ARCES@UNIBO

The Internet of Things (IoTs) is growing fast both in terms of number of devices connected and of complexity of deployments and applications. Several research studies an- alyzing the economical impact of the IoT worldwide identify the interoperability as one of the main boosting factor for its growth, thanks to the possibility to unlock novel commercial opportunities derived from the integration of heterogeneous systems which are currently not interconnected. However, at present, interoperability constitutes a relevant practical issue on any IoT deployments that is composed of sensor platforms mapped on different wireless technologies, network protocols or data formats. The paper addresses such issue, and investigates how to achieve effective data interoperability and data reuse on complex IoT deployments, where multiple users/applications need to consume sensor data produced by heterogeneous sensor networks. We propose a generic three-tier IoT architecture, which decouples the sensor data producers from the sensor data consumers, thanks to the intermediation of a semantic broker which is in charge of translating the sensor data into a shared ontology, and of providing publish-subscribe facilities to the producers/consumers. Then, we describe the real-world implementation of such architecture devised at the Advanced Research Center on Electronic System (ARCES) of the University of Bologna. The actual system collects the data produced by three different sensor networks, integrates them through a SPARQL Event Processing Architecture (SEPA), and supports two front- end applications for the data access, i.e. a web dashboard and an Amazon Alexa voice service

HABITAT: An IoT Solution for Independent Elderly

In this work, a flexible and extensive digital platform for Smart Homes is presented, exploiting the most advanced technologies of the Internet of Things, such as Radio Frequency Identification, wearable electronics, Wireless Sensor Networks, and Artificial Intelligence. Thus, the main novelty of the paper is the system-level description of the platform flexibility allowing the interoperability of different smart devices. This research was developed within the framework of the operative project HABITAT (Home Assistance Based on the Internet of Things for the Autonomy of Everybody), aiming at developing smart devices to support elderly people both in their own houses and in retirement homes, and embedding them in everyday life objects, thus reducing the expenses for healthcare due to the lower need for personal assistance, and providing a better life quality to the elderly users