OWL-based Ontology for Secure and Adaptable Ubiquitous Environment

Computing is moving towards ubiquitous vision where applications have to be context-aware and adapt their behavior without explicit interaction with the user. We claim that context-aware ubiquitous services browsers (CAUSB) which utilize the reasoning for classifying the services based on the context and security will become an essential part of these environments. UPnP is an appropriate technology, but still not suitable for ubiquitous vision, in particular CAUSB, since the control point such as a mobile phone or a PDA provides the user with all the services in the surrounding without taking into account the context information, it only relieves him from having the physical contact with the device, and it doesn´t support any adaptation. Lots of work has been done for context modeling, however, adaptability and security still remaining among other challenges. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a reusable ubiquitous OWL-based ontology for a smart home. Our ontology is modeled into two levels: a generic core level and a domain specific level. We also propose a novel integration of the context-based adaptation and security policies into that ontology along with the domain and its context knowledge representation.