A Task Repository for Ambient Intelligence

This paper describes a task repository, a device semantic interface to express device capabilities, and an advice algorithm that suggests the best task-device pair to satisfy a request. The purpose of the task repository is the adaptation of a pervasive environment (Ambient Intelligence) to support natural language applications, such as a natural language interface. The task repository has a predefined group of concepts linked to linguistic and semantic resources and is updated, at runtime, with task descriptors associated with a set of heterogeneous devices. We assume that each device, belonging to the pervasive environment, holds its own semantic interface essentially composed of task descriptors. This approach tries to reach the ubiquitous essence of natural language, because the coverage of handmade lexical resources is limited, coverage problems remain for applications involving specific domains or involving multiple languages. Furthermore, we reduce the interface device problem to a database access problem. An environment simulator with the respective set of devices is