Smart applications for the maintenance of large buildings: How to achieve ontology-based interoperability at the information level

Industrial applications for smart environments call for techniques and methodologies to improve interoperability, reusability, and easy integration with existing applications, thus reducing development costs and time-to-market. This paper presents a novel and practical approach to smart context-aware applications for the maintenance of large buildings, where ontology-based interoperability is exploited to enable the easy integration of multivendor multiplatform devices/sensors with existing applications. The proposed solution has been designed and implemented on top of the smart environment architecture developed within the SOFIA project. In particular, the paper shows how it is possible to realize a set of context-aware smart maintenance applications capable of monitoring environmental variables, automatically detecting building-related faults, and promptly calling for specific interventions in a multi-modal way, always by carefully considering the need for high cross-industry interoperability.