A context service for multimodal pervasive environments

Pervasive computing environments can proficiently benefit from a new generation of multimodal systems and services, which enable users to interact in natural ways like voice, gesture, facial motions, and so on. However, in order to make this possible, it is necessary to integrate such systems and services, possibly in a transparent way, in the environments. In addition to this, it is important to note that the presence of multimodal systems of interaction deeply affects the concept of context. For this reason, in the present paper, we present new aspects for the concept of context that emerge in a multimodal pervasive environment. Such new characteristics have been pointed out and modeled by means of an ontology and rules based approach. Specifically, the SOUPA ontology, which is a standard ontology for pervasive environments, have been extended and specified to take care of both hardware devices and software services for multimodal interactions. As well, several rules have been defined in order to make environments able to proactively use the best interaction system with respect to user and environment context. Definitively, we have designed and developed an ontology-based service that i) exploits OWL ontologies and SWRL rules, ii) integrates them in a software component for multimodal pervasive environment, and iii) performs logic and reasoning mechanisms, in order to proactively handle multimodal systems for user interactions.