A novel ontology consistent with acknowledged standards in smart homes

Abstract

With the development of Internet of Things, the Smart Home equipped with various sensors and devices has become a hot area attracting global attention and concern. In order to get a better understanding of ambient environments, adding semantics to sensor data plays a significant role. Researchers are attempting to build semantic models in order to satisfy their own requirements, which leads to little reusability between different models. This paper aims to provide a novel ontology which follows publicly acknowledged standards for achieving sensor data semantization in smart homes, including modeling sensors, context and activities with semantics. For keeping consistent with current accepted standards, the proposed ontology is based on the Semantic Sensor Network Ontology. In addition, we enrich the ontologies by incorporating spatiotemporal information and user profiles. The ontology is designed using Protégé and a use case is demonstrated to show the great potentiality in daily activity recognition in smart homes.