Enabling the Smart Home Through a Semantic-Based Context-Aware System

This paper describes CasAware, a context-aware system allowing domestic distributed devices to interoperate and collaborate with each other exploiting the Internet of Things. CasAware’s main purpose is to improve inhabitants’ level of comfort and well-being, enforcing their safety, while optimizing time and energy consumption of appliances. The envisioned system leverages combined exploitation of various technologies ranging from Cloud Computing to Semantic Web technologies. In particular, it takes advantage of ontological modelling techniques to formalize the knowledge of different domestic domains (house, appliances, sensors and the pieces of information they share) and exploits semantic reasoning techniques to infer new insights from already known facts. Although the potential of semantic approach has been investigated in many recent researches, various challenges have to be faced in order to make it feasible on a large scale. These challenges are analyzed through three different motivating scenarios, which also contribute to elicit the requirements of the CasAware system.