Towards a Better Understanding of Semantic Ontology-Based Home Service Modelling

With rapid advances in the enabling technologies for pervasive computing and with the requirements for communication systems autonomy, ontology-based semantic approaches as applied to contextual application scenarios have recently received a great deal of attention from the research community. However, service modelling using semantic knowledge sources and the available service semantic description languages can be a time and effort consuming process, which thus leads to the poor acceptance of semantic technologies. The semantic support environment presented in this research addresses this shortcoming providing a more illustrative and understandable way to view ontology instances associated with complex contextual information. It enables semantic modelling and the interactive simulation of physical real-world contextual environments of interest (i.e. devices, services, functional capabilities of service, contexts). It provides support for the design of applications or middleware level services.