Context-aware multi-layered ontology for composite situation model in pervasive computing

Abstract

With the rapid advancement of technologies and analysis tools in the smart systems, enabling real-time context monitoring of user's living conditions and quality services delivery is increasing. Current studies in this area are focused on developing mobile applications with specific services, based on toolkit that allow developers to obtain context information from sensors. However, there exists a notable lack of ontology able to represent all the necessary context information starting from distributed users, and constantly changing environment. The modeling of user’s domains to represent diverse mobile and IoT devices, and finalizing with the description of user’s composite situations in smart-*(health, home, cities, car, office, etc.) domains. Considering interoperability, reusability, and flexibility, a new context composite situation ontology for smart systems is proposed with better representation of heterogeneous context. The ontology enables to sense, reason, and infer composite situations in various smart domains, prioritizes critical situations and facilitates the delivery of smart mobile service. Proposed ontology is formalized and validated on different smart environments with different user’s situations. Several experiments were carried out with a real-life motivating scenario. Experimental results showed that the proposed approach has reduced queries times and improved flexibility.