Using a Residential Environment Domain Ontology for Discovering and Integrating Smart Objects in Complex Scenarios

Nowadays, in residential environments context, an increasing number of connected devices and objects ( that fall broadly into two categories: actuators and sensors) provide useful functionalities and services to improve urban living conditions. These devices and their associated services, however, cannot be easily integrated to create new composite applications, such as controlling different home devices for saving energy or enhancing user comfort. In order to meet this requirement, we propose a domain ontology to discover, search, use and share information and services of residential environment devices. This ontology forms the central part of our proposed application development framework. In this paper, we briefly introduce this ontology and explain, through examples, how it is used during the different steps of an application development process. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V.