Applying Semantic Technologies for Context-Aware AAL Services: What we can learn from SOPRANO
Abstract
Ambient assisted living (AAL) is a newly emerging term describing a research area with focus on services that support people in their daily life with particular focus on elderly people. This includes reminding and alerting the assisted $person(s)$ and their environment, giving feedback, advice, and impulses for physical, or social activities, among others. All of these supportive actions need to be context-aware. Se- mantic technologies have been considered to be a perfect fit for context-awareness in pervasive computing and ambient intelligence. Mainstream semantic (web) technologies are nowadays largely based on description logics and the W3C standard OWL- DL (c.f. [WZGP04], [DB08], [PVdBW+04], and [ESB07]), which are also used in the AAL domain (see [PG07] and [KC06]). The analysis of the scenarios and use cases, however, have yielded requirements and constraints, which have shown that these mainstream technologies are not well-suited for the AAL domain. In this paper we present the SOPRANO approach as an alternative semantic approach to capturing, managing, and enriching context information for context-aware AAL services.
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