An ontology-based context model in a smart home

Abstract

This paper introduces an ontology-based context model in ubiquitous computing environment. We describe a Getting up scenario to show whether the model is valuable for description of context information in a home domain. We modeled context metadata as well as context information. Context metadata are defined for the use of additional context information such as probabilistic or fuzzy logic reasoning, rich understanding, or efficient context information collection. In addition we developed a context ontology server that manages and processes context information and metadata, and it is based on the ontologybased context model which is introduced in this paper. We used OWL (Web Ontology Language) for modeling the context, and extended the OWL language to represent context metadata. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.