Semantic connections: Exploring and manipulating connections in smart spaces

In envisioned smart environments, enabled by ubiquitous computing technologies, electronic objects will be able to interconnect and interoperate. How will users of such smart environments make sense of the connections that are made and the information that is exchanged? This Internet of Things could have a life of its own, exchanging digital concepts and values between its members, having an understanding of each other and communicating in their own language. In this paper we report on an ongoing research project in the context of smart home environments. We discuss possibilities to represent this digital world in the physical reality we live in, by providing handles to control and clues to understand, build conceptual models of connections that exist or can be made. This is achieved by making semantic abstractions of low-level events and presenting them to users at a higher level, in a simplified fashion. Furthermore, we used an ontology to describe the low-level events, and used reasoning to infer high-level meaningful information. Although we are in the preliminary stages of our research, we consider it worthwhile to share and illustrate our findings by presenting a demonstrator, that implements our ideas in a home entertainment scenario.