A Semantic Context Service for Smart Offices

Smart Home environments aim to integrate physical devices, human beings and computing entities in homes and buildings. They have to support characteristics coming from mobile computing, ubiquitous computing and sensor networking in order to provide intelligent, context-aware and pro-active applications. In this vision, "context" plays a central role; but, the raw context data, obtained by various data sources, are represented in heterogeneous formats and thus it's not possible to understand their meanings without a prior knowledge of the particular context information model. Therefore, data sources are not able to produce high-level context information, but provide only raw information. Such low-level information should be combined in order to generate higher-level context information. In this paper we propose a Semantic Context Service, that exploits Semantic Web technologies to support Smart Offices. In particular, this service relies on ontologies and rules to classify several typologies of entities, which can be involved in smart homes and offices, and to infer higher-level context information from low-level information coming from positioning systems and sensors in the physical environments.