Semantic Reasoning Framework to Supervise and Manage Contexts and Objects in Pervasive Computing Environments

In spite of the fact that many of the proposed context awareness frameworks allow scalability and dynamic interaction with heterogeneous devices disseminated in the environment, very often they are not able to fully profit from the semantic technology to supervise and manage the environment. Indeed, using ontologies allows us to integrate information coming from heterogeneous sources and to share it easily. The most important challenge to face in this context is how the system can understand easily the behavior and context events handled by all the actors (person, robot, actuators, sensors ... etc.) to take an adequate decision. The work presented here shows how the semantic reasoning framework used in the SEMbySEM European project, based on the use of a new semantic language (a “μConcept Knowledge Representation Language”) built up on top of RDF(S) and of the corresponding “μConcept Rule Language may facilitate reasoning and acting upon heterogeneous context sources, allowing their `intelligent' monitoring and management and their dynamic visualization. For the validation of the proposed concepts and models, a concrete scenario dedicated to the monitoring of elderly people in smart home has been proposed and implemented.