Modeling the home environment using ontology with applications in software configuration management

The rapid development of the network technologies has enabled the construction of heterogeneous home networks. However, the control of the smart home environment that ensures the conflict-free, up-to-date and smooth functioning of the home environment is not trivial. It is necessary to track the state of the numerous devices which compose the home environment, as well as the respective services installed on them, to ensure conflict-free seamless operation of the system. In this paper we present an ontology-enabled knowledge base for home networks. The knowledge base allows to depict complex relations between devices and services working in a home environment, for example issues to be considered before installing a new software version on a certain device, such as the user profile, interference with existing devices, etc. The knowledge base is a part of the COMANCHE system, which aims to provide a software configuration management infrastructure which can be used in the home automation domain. To the best of our knowledge, the presented system provides a first comprehensive framework for reasoning about services in the home environment realized in close collaboration with the relevant industry.