An ontology-based context-aware infrastructure for smart homes

A general infrastructure that can facilitate the development of context-aware applications in smart homes is proposed. Unlike previous systems, our system builds on semantic web technologies, and it particularly concerns the contexts from human-artifact interaction. A multi-levels' design of our ontology (called SS-ONT) makes it possible to realize context sharing and end-user-oriented customization. Using this infrastructure as a basis, we address some of the principles involved in performing context querying and context reasoning. The performance of our system is evaluated through a series of experiments.