An Ontology Based Context Management System for Smart Environments

This paper proposes an ontology-enabled system for context management for smart environments. Central to the system is ontological sensor modelling, which attaches metadata and meaning to sensor data, thus supporting data repurposing and high-level content recognition. In addition, semantic sensor descriptions allow sensors to be automatically identified whenever they are put into an environment. Based on this, a novel plug-n-measure data acquisition mechanism has been developed to automatically detect and recognise new devices and update the contextual data relating to these devices on a real-time basis. The context management system has been developed based on the latest semantic technologies and deployed in an intelligent meeting room. The paper describes an experiment and presents initial results, which has demonstrated that the system is working.