Put the User in Control: Ontology-Driven Meta-level Interaction for Pervasive Environments

Pervasive computing environments are complex to interact with due to the dynamic assembly of interaction resources and the need to adapt to sudden changes in the environment configuration. When the complexity of such an environment is masked by the underlying computing system, end-users are often left with limited or no control over their interactive space. This brings up the need to make users aware of their surroundings and to provide them with runtime control over the environment configuration. We present a semantic meta-layer that encapsulates a model, view and controller to support the design of context-aware pervasive applications that can be controlled and evaluated by the end-users at runtime.