Developing Ontology for Intelligent Home Service Framework

Home services are all kind of services which are provided in home environment. Legacy Researches was focused on controlling home devices and appliances. And recent works focus on the multimedia services. In the future, devices existing in the home would infer the status and intention of users and provide intelligent home services without much intervention of users. To do this, there must be context-aware technologies [1]. This research focused on the ontology which is the core technology of the context information management [2]. Through developing ontology for the home services, we classified services into several categories and, described requirements for the service execution. And then, we adopted the ontology for the intelligent home service framework called iHSF. Ontology designed for the home services consists of the concept of users, places (semantic locations), environment around the specific places, devices and individual services and subordinate concepts of them, which all concepts have properties and relations among them [2]. Ontology for the iHSF has form of RDF (resource description framework) [3, 4, 5] and OWL (web ontology language) [6, 7] in order to be interpreted by devices. Ontology should mirror the constantly varying environment of the home dynamically. iHSF using well-designed ontology reacts to the constantly varying .context on a real time basis.