Smart environments meet the semantic web

Abstract

Smart Environments are designed to proactively assist their users. One way to achieve this is by composing sequences of potential user actions and of devices' actions at run time. This requires the actions to be specified in a declarative manner. A favorable formalism for declarative descriptions are semantic web services. In this paper, we describe our approach to proactive assistance in smart environments and explain how semantic web services can be employed as the basic building blocks for such an environment. We provide a state-of-the-art review of existing semantic web service technologies and discuss how they should be enhanced to suit our needs. Copyright 2008 ACM.