The DOG gateway: enabling ontology-based intelligent domotic environments

This paper moves a first step towards the creation of Intelligent Domotic Environments (IDE) in real-life home-living. A new Domotic OSGi Gateway (DOG) is presented, able to manage different domotic networks as a single, technology neutral, home automation system. The adoption of a standard framework such as OSGi, and of sophisticated modeling techniques stemming from the Semantic Web research community, allows DOG to go beyond simple automation and to support reasoning-based intelligence inside home environments. By exploiting automatic device generalization, syntactic and semantic command validation, and internetwork scenario definition, DOG provides the building blocks for supporting the evolution of current, isolated, home automation plants into IDEs, where heterogeneous devices and domotic systems are coordinated to behave as a single, intelligent, proactive system. The paper introduces the DOG architecture and the underlying ontology modeling. A case study is also illustrated, where DOG controls a laboratory reconstruction of a simple domotic environment.