Semantically Enriched Integration Framework for Ubiquitous Computing Environment

Miniaturization, reduced costs of electronic components, and advanced information technologies now open practical possibilities to design, develop and deploy thousands of the coin-sized sensors and mechanical devices at multiple locations. This kind of softwarehardware systems, pervasively available to the user in everyday activities, is named Ubiquitous Computing Environment (UCE) (Abowd & Mynatt, 2000; Niemelä & Latvakoski 2004), or even Ubiquitous Smart Space (Jeng, 2004 ; Kawahara et al., 2004). Establishing ad hoc communication via wireless media numerous elements of the UCE provide the user with real-time global sensing, context-aware informational retrieval, and enhanced visualization capabilities. In effect, they give extremely new abilities to look at and interact with our habitat. Many researches made a contribution to developing of Sensors and Actuators Networks (SANET), which became a foundation of UCE. There are tiny hardware devices available in practice for building SANET, embedded operating systems, wireless network protocols, and algorithms of effective energy management (Misc.Tinyos, 2010; Feng et al., 2002; Tilak et al., 2002; Crossbow, 2010). Now researchers’ community demonstrates growing interest to resolving the next important problem that will be faced by the developers and the users of UCE since a short time. That is the problem of semantic interoperability in the joint context of SANET, existing IT-infrastructure and people society. Resent results (Branch et al., 2005 ; Curino et al., 2005 ; Tsetsos et al., 2005; Ahamed et al., 2004; Tokunaga et al., 2004 ; Chan et al., 2005) show applicability of the middleware paradigm for the solution of that problem, and provide for approaches facilitating integration of SANET on the application level of enterprise systems. However in the case of actual wide-area UCE, multiple SANETs spread across administrative borders, enterprises, and even social cultures. Deep involving of tiny computing devices in our everyday activities requires closer coincidence of computer interfaces with people’s way of perception and mental world models. As activities and social experience are different, the mental world models also differ. So, interfacing with the same sensors can be absolutely dissimilar in respect with the style, modality and informational contents. The same raw data collected by sensors can be interpreted differently and can be applied in absolutely divergent contexts. This simple fact breaks a “closed world” assumption, and requires shedding light of researcher’s attention on such