Using Ontology Reasoning in Building a Simple and Effective Dialog System for a Smart Home System

This paper presents a dialog system for the user in interacting with a smart home system. Instead of using just a voice control for appliances, a dialog system gives the user a more natural way of communication with the smart home. The dialog system can take different forms of instruction from the user and provides services to the user. The user can inquire the system about some information instead of just ordering appliances to operate. With a dialog system, the system can also give a more informative response to the user. This paper focuses on processing the semantic information from the user input and producing a set of clear service request to send to the service provider. By limiting the application to a smaller set of services, we introduce an ontology reasoning technique to construct a simple dialog system that accepts explicit and implicit user requests. Two different kinds of ontology, the home ontology and the family member ontology, are constructed. A prototype system is presented along with demonstration using scenarios to show the result of our work.