Combining Agents and Ontologies to Support Task-Centred Interoperability in Ambient Intelligent Environments

This article describes our approach towards the specification and realization of interoperability within Next Generation Ambient Intelligent Environments (NGAIE). These are populated with numerous devices and multiple occupants or users exhibit increasingly intelligent behaviour, provide optimized resource usage and support consistent functionality and human-centric operation. In NGAIEs users will interact with their environments using the devices therein complemented with adaptive multimodal dialogue. This requires the definition of the local and global information which is relevant to the interaction and mechanisms to share this knowledge among entities. In our approach, knowledge is represented as a set of heterogeneous ontologies which have to be aligned in order to provide a uniform and consistent knowledge representation. The combination of heterogeneous ontologies and ontology matching algorithms allows for semantically rich information exchange. Based on a combination of agent-based and service-oriented architectures, the proposed approach adopts a task-based model to maximize the use of available heterogeneous resources.