Ontological framework of context-aware and reasoning middleware for smart homes with health and social services

Modern buildings are equipped with multiple systems, which are dedicated to improve quality of living for inhabitants and to facilitate performance of daily duties for maintenance personnel. Yet the variety of the systems causes the bulky informational flow, which may result informational tense to the user, time lost and increase of errors. To make life comfortable in a smart house, the inhabitants of the building should have an access to the simple and intuitive control and monitoring of the apartment, and the maintenance personnel should have a handily informational support for the prioritizing and efficient performance of the maintenance tasks. Thus, there is a need in intelligent management of information flow to provide data to the users with regards to the context like for instance on-going situation and goals, user´s intentions, state and role in the system. This paper proposes framework of context-aware middleware as a solution for information management in the system. Context-awareness is achieved with ontological knowledge models of the system and two-level reasoning upon the ontologies. The enabled technologies are discussed with relation to the use case, which is a combination of smart home and elderly care services. Future steps towards framework realization end the paper.