A Hybrid Ontological and Temporal Approach for Composite Activity Modelling

Activity modelling is required to support activity recognition and further to provide activity assistance for users in smart homes. Current research in knowledge-driven activity modelling has mainly focused on single activities with little attention being paid to the modelling of composite activities such as interleaved and concurrent activities. This paper presents a hybrid approach to composite activity modelling by combining ontological and temporal knowledge modelling formalisms. Ontological modelling constructors, i.e. concepts and properties for describing composite activities, have been developed and temporal modelling operators have been introduced. As such, the resulting approach is able to model both static and dynamic characteristics of activities. Several composite activity models have been created based on the proposed approach. In addition, a set of inference rules has been provided for use in composite activity recognition. A concurrent meal preparation scenario is used to illustrate both the proposed approach and associated reasoning mechanisms for composite activity recognition.