Distributed Context-Aware Applications by Means of Web of Things and Semantic Web Technologies

Abstract

Ambient Assisted Living aims for providing context-aware and adaptive applications to assist elderly and impaired people in their everyday living environment. This requires the recognition of user intentions and activities by means of multi-modal and heterogeneous sensing devices. An unresolved problem is the lack of interoperability and extendibility of the setting. Moreover, to achieve adaptivity, a context-aware environment requires to consider user impairments as well as capabilities and to monitor non-stop user activities. This complicates an on the fly integration of new sensing devices and applications. Furthermore, a flexible and expressive domain model for describing and processing user profiles, intentions and activities, is required. Our approach to overcome these integration and modeling problems, is to use the Web of Things and Semantic Web technologies. Another unresolved problem concerns the security of the collected sensitive data. To avoid the manipulation of applications by an unauthorized access, we introduce ontology based security policies for context-aware applications, considering their managed context data.