An Ontology-Based System For Smart Home Management

Smart Home refers to the system where all sub-systems concerning daily life are connected through an information management platform, by using computing, networking and connecting technology. Along with the development of different kinds of smart home technologies, the concept of human-centered is becoming a new big concern.In this paper, the author proposes platform architecture for "User-Device-Environment" for the communication and interactions among the three and redefines the relationships among them. Firstly, the paper analyses the requirement of the system, including data requirement, process requirement and control requirement and research the related key technologies. On basis of this, the author gives out three-layer architecture for satisfying the control requirement. Then, the author satisfies the data and process by inporting a "semantic layer" into the system to improve the users'experience. The semantic layer consists of two parts, data processing and control specification. For data processing, the author builds semantic models by using ontology technology to organizing all the data in the system in a structured way. For control specification, by using the semantic models as communication media, the system realizes the fuzzy analysis and auto-judgement by reading and writing information, setting rules and doing inference. In a word, by applying semantics into the smart home management system, the system is transferring from a simple command expressor to a smart assistant for the users.Finally, the author demonstrates the feasibility of the system by explaining several scenarios and cases.