Semantic framework for context-aware monitoring of AAL ecosystems

Abstract

International audienceThe Web of Objects is a new emerging concept that represents a new way of organizing physical or immaterial objects—or things—delivering a high level of services that can be discovered, composed, executed, and monitored. Building an ambient assisted living (AAL) ecosystem, according to this vision, is of great interest since it consists of multiple heterogeneous objects that need to be semantically and automatically interoperable. In this chapter, a new semantic framework for monitoring the AAL heterogeneous ecosystems is presented. This framework deals with context awareness and closed-world assumption (CWA) semantic reasoning in designing management rules and ontologies. It preserves, on one hand, the structural expressiveness provided by ontologies, through the compatibility with the W3C recommendations and, on the other hand, it takes advantage of the full benefit of the production rule reasoning. It is capable of dynamically detecting real-world objects and capturing their contexts, in order to identify the specific changes that are happening in the environment, to infer the current situation and to react accordingly. Context management is designed by combining the micro-concept ontology language into a set rules and queries using the SEMbySEM business rule language. These rules allow us to express high-level reasoning over context events, sent from the façade, while the queries allow us to generate high-level monitoring views, concerning manageable objects status and context, as well as their measures and produced activities. Conversely, the monitoring rules can trigger control actions that are translated, by the façade, into concrete operations on the targeted manageable object. In order to validate the proposed framework, a scenario dedicated to the safety of elderly people in smart homes is proposed and implemented hereby