Abstract
Automation in computing systems has always been considered a valuable solution to unburden the user. Internet of Things (IoT) technology best suits automation in different domains, such as home automation, retail, industry, and transportation, to name but a few. While these domains are strongly characterized by implicit user interaction, more recently, automation has been adopted also for the provision of interactive and immersive experiences that actively involve the users. IoT technology thus becomes the key for Smart Interactive Experiences (SIEs), i.e., immersive automated experiences created by orchestrating different devices to enable smart environments to fluidly react to the final users’ behavior. There are domains, e.g., cultural heritage, where these systems and the SIEs can support and provide several benefits. However, experts of such domains, while intrigued by the opportunity to induce SIEs, are facing tough challenges in their everyday work activities when they are required to automate and orchestrate IoT devices without the necessary coding skills. This paper presents a design approach that tries to overcome these difficulties thanks to the adoption of ontologies for defining Event-Condition-Action rules. More specifically, the approach enables domain experts to identify and specify properties of IoT devices through a user-defined semantics that, being closer to the domain experts’ background, facilitates them in automating the IoT devices behavior. We also present a study comparing three different interaction paradigms conceived to support the specification of user-defined semantics through a “transparent” use of ontologies. Based on the results of this study, we work out some lessons learned on how the proposed paradigms help domain experts express their semantics, which in turn facilitates the creation of interactive applications enabling SIEs.
Highlights
Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, 32, 20134 Milan, ItalyAutomated systems have their roots in the field of automation, which has been defined by the Britannica encyclopedia as the application of machines to tasks once performed by human beings or, increasingly, to tasks that would otherwise be impossible.1 Around the 1940s, the term automation was coined in the automobile industry to indicate the use of automatic devices in the mechanized production line
Pers Ubiquit Comput (2020) 24:781–796. It is promoting the development of smart applications and smart environments in different domains and application areas, from home automation [23], to smart factories [49], to ambient assisted living [30], whose peculiarity is the orchestration of rules governing the automatic behavior of multiple devices
Existing approaches for task automation in Internet of Things (IoT) support the orchestration of few smart objects [20] but do not fit domains and application areas where lay-people want to automate complex and rich ecosystems of IoT devices installed in the environment or carried on by final users
Summary
Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, 32, 20134 Milan, ItalyAutomated systems have their roots in the field of automation, which has been defined by the Britannica encyclopedia as the application of machines to tasks once performed by human beings or, increasingly, to tasks that would otherwise be impossible. Around the 1940s, the term automation was coined in the automobile industry to indicate the use of automatic devices in the mechanized production line. It is promoting the development of smart applications and smart environments in different domains and application areas, from home automation [23], to smart factories [49], to ambient assisted living [30], whose peculiarity is the orchestration of rules governing the automatic behavior of multiple devices. Some of such systems are fully automated; i.e., the orchestration of IoT devices and Web services is used to monitor the environment and automate some tasks . Explicit user actions are still possible, and can be required to control the activation of some devices, for example, vocal commands for conversational agents controlling the homeautomation system (e.g., Alexa), but are not essential for the functioning of the system
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