Uniform Access to Domotic Environments through Semantics

This paper proposes a Domotic OSGi Gateway (DOG) able to expose different domotic networks as a single, technology neutral, home automation system. The adoption of a standard framework such as OSGi, and of sophisticated modeling techniques stemming from the Semantic Web research community, allows DOG to go beyond simple automation and to support reasoning-based intelligence inside home environments. By exploiting the DogOnt ontology for automatic device generalization, syntactic and semantic command validation, and internetwork scenario definition, DOG provides the building blocks for evolving current, isolated, home automation plants into so-called Intelligent Domotic Environments, where heterogeneous devices and domotic systems are coordinated to behave as a single, intelligent, proactive system. The paper introduces the DOG architecture by looking at functionalities provided by each of its components and by describing features that exploit ontology-modeling.