Project Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4250 words

Project - Essay Example ABSTRACT Pervasive environment is the emerging computing paradigm that aims to provide users access to services all the time, everywhere, in a transparent way, by means of devices installed in the surrounding physical environment or worn by the user. Smart environment represents the evolutionary development of pervasive environment. Web ontology language has become a promising technology to capture the knowledge of smart environment and information about its inhabitants. In this project, an ontological framework (taxonomy) of a smart home for the elderly has been developed. Protege-OWL 4.1 was used to build OWL representation of the elderly smart home. The presented ontology implements reasoning set on the rules of the ontology and elimination of the rules outside of the ontology. Chapter 1 1.1 Introduction In recent years, rapid advances in technology have paved the way for the creation of pervasive environments. A pervasive environment [1] is a user-centric environment in which the re are a number of devices (sensors, computers) and services (such as Web services) that help users to achieve their various application goals. Smart environments [2] represent the evolutionary development of pervasive environments. Smart environment [2] is able to acquire knowledge about its inhabitants and their surroundings, and adapt to the inhabitants’ behaviour or preferences in order to improve their living experiences. The type of inhabitants’ experiences may vary from the safety of the users to the progress of an independent living environment. An important characteristic of smart environments is the interaction of smart devices including sensors and computer systems used for acquiring inhabitants’ contexts such as locations, activities, or vital signs. Therefore, context awareness [7] is a key issue for improving inhabitants’ independent living experience. Context awareness is about the situation an inhabitant is in and also about adapting the s mart devices’ reaction to that situation. Ontology language [3] is the context representation technology which maximises the context awareness of the smart devices. It is a set of vocabulary to describe the conceptualisation of a particular domain. One of the goals of this project is to build a context-aware [7] ontology based on the acquired context from a smart environment and the inhabitants. The context in this project consists of location, time, and information on inhabitant’s vital signs. The ontology represents concepts and relations for the acquired context. The aim is to represent all the acquired information in context [7] form to reduce the dependency of the framework on rules outside of the ontology. 1.2 project aims and objectives 1.2.1 The aim of the project The essence of pervasive healthcare is in the creation of smart environments integrated with their respective inhabitants. A characteristic of