Combining ontology alignment with model driven engineering techniques for home devices interoperability

Abstract

Ubiquitous Systems are expected in the near future to have much more impact on our daily tasks thanks to advances in embedded systems, "Plug-n- Play" protocols and software architectures. Such protocols target home devices and enables automatic discovery and interaction among them. Consequently, smart applications are shaping the home into a smart one by orchestrating devices in an elegant manner. Currently, several protocols coexist in smart homes but interactions between devices cannot be put into action unless devices are supporting the same protocol. Furthermore, smart applications must know in advance names of services and devices to interact with them. However, such names are semantically equivalent but syntactically different needing translation mechanisms. In order to reduce human efforts for achieving interoperability, we introduce an approach combining ontology alignment techniques with those of Model Driven Engineering domain to reach a dynamic service adaptation. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.