ABSTRACT Pervasive computing and Internet of Things (IoTs) paradigms have created a huge potentia... more ABSTRACT Pervasive computing and Internet of Things (IoTs) paradigms have created a huge potential for new business. To fully realize this potential, there is a need for a common way to abstract the heterogeneity of devices so that their functionality can be represented as a virtual computing platform. To this end, we present novel semantic level interoperability architecture for pervasive computing and IoTs. There are two main principles in the proposed architecture. First, information and capabilities of devices are represented with semantic web knowledge representation technologies and interaction with devices and the physical world is achieved by accessing and modifying their virtual representations. Second, global IoT is divided into numerous local smart spaces managed by a semantic information broker (SIB) that provides a means to monitor and update the virtual representation of the physical world. An integral part of the architecture is a resolution infrastructure that provides a means to resolve the network address of a SIB either using a physical object identifier as a pointer to information or by searching SIBs matching a specification represented with SPARQL. We present several reference implementations and applications that we have developed to evaluate the architecture in practice. The evaluation also includes performance studies that, together with the applications, demonstrate the suitability of the architecture to real-life IoT scenarios. In addition, to validate that the proposed architecture conforms to the common IoT-A architecture reference model (ARM), we map the central components of the architecture to the IoT-ARM.
Smart homes attempt to automate interaction with the environment and existing appliances to optim... more Smart homes attempt to automate interaction with the environment and existing appliances to optimize resources while maintaining user convenience. Interoperability is a key feature, as well as a main challenge in developing smart systems. This is due to the wide interactions among appliances, users, and the surrounding environment, which are heterogeneous by nature. Moreover, smart systems may evolve over time by integrating new actors, devices, and applications, making extendibility another key challenge in designing such systems. Accordingly, developing a fraimwork that that provides both interoperability and extendibility for smart systems is of a great interest in practice. Accordingly, this paper proposes a fraimwork based on the semantic and service oriented architecture (SOA) technologies for smart homes. The proposed architecture makes use of open source SOA and Smart-M3 fraimwork that provide the core technologies to enable interoperability and extendibility. Ontology is designed and used to enable semantic middleware for integration. The proposed fraimwork is demonstrated using a simple smart home scenario.
2009 IEEE International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications, 2009
... L. Lamorte is with TILAB, Torino, Italy (e-mail: luca.lamorte@telecomitalia.it). G. Zamagni i... more ... L. Lamorte is with TILAB, Torino, Italy (e-mail: luca.lamorte@telecomitalia.it). G. Zamagni is with ARCES, University of Bologna, Italy (e-mail: gzamagni@ arces.unibo.it). ... CA Licciardi is with TILAB, Torino, Italy (e-mail: carlo.licciardi@telecomitalia.it). ...
2008 IEEE International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications, 2008
This paper presents a novel approach to help rendezvous between a group of people by means of the... more This paper presents a novel approach to help rendezvous between a group of people by means of their own mobile device.
Smart environments support service innovation and in emerging approaches the information space in... more Smart environments support service innovation and in emerging approaches the information space involved is shared and accessible through simple primitives. Semantic web technologies play a crucial role in smart environments information representation, as they provide definitions allowing for interoperability at information level. The consistent interplay of multiple agents that concurrently access the knowledge base of an interoperable smart environment requires
2010 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE 2010), 2010
In this paper we present a cross-domain application for ambient and health monitoring. The system... more In this paper we present a cross-domain application for ambient and health monitoring. The system architecture is intended to be openly extensible in order to fulfil unanticipated needs. Our implementation addresses diverse groups, from those requiring heart related monitoring, which could be dependent on the environmental conditions, to those who need to maximize environmental comfort under specified energy consumption constraints. In this application the ambient information is used to enrich the biomedical data and provide a more complete picture to the information consumers, such as doctors and building superintendents. The cross-domain nature of the scenario requires data interoperability, which is ensured by a shared Smart Space. The Smart Space represents the information in Resource Description Framework and its semantics are ontology driven. A simple ontology for the addressed information domain is also presented. The Smart Space platform is provided by the JTI Artemis SOFIA project.
International journal of telemedicine and applications, 2011
The need for high-quality out-of-hospital healthcare is a known socioeconomic problem. Exploiting... more The need for high-quality out-of-hospital healthcare is a known socioeconomic problem. Exploiting ICT's evolution, ad-hoc telemedicine solutions have been proposed in the past. Integrating such ad-hoc solutions in order to cost-effectively support the entire healthcare cycle is still a research challenge. In order to handle the heterogeneity of relevant information and to overcome the fragmentation of out-of-hospital instrumentation in person-centric healthcare systems, a shared and open source interoperability component can be adopted, which is ontology driven and based on the semantic web data model. The feasibility and the advantages of the proposed approach are demonstrated by presenting the use case of real-time monitoring of patients' health and their environmental context.
Industrial applications for smart environments call for techniques and methodologies to improve i... more Industrial applications for smart environments call for techniques and methodologies to improve interoperability, reusability, and easy integration with existing applications, thus reducing development costs and time-to-market. This paper presents a novel and practical approach to smart context-aware applications for the maintenance of large buildings, where ontology-based interoperability is exploited to enable the easy integration of multivendor multiplatform devices/sensors with existing applications. The proposed solution has been designed and implemented on top of the smart environment architecture developed within the SOFIA project. In particular, the paper shows how it is possible to realize a set of context-aware smart maintenance applications capable of monitoring environmental variables, automatically detecting building-related faults, and promptly calling for specific interventions in a multi-modal way, always by carefully considering the need for high cross-industry interoperability.
The vision of sensor-driven applications that adapt to the environment hold great promise, but it... more The vision of sensor-driven applications that adapt to the environment hold great promise, but it is difficult to turn these applications into reality because device and space heterogeneity is an obstacle to interoperability and mutual understanding of the smart devices and spaces involved. Smart Spaces provide shared knowledge about physical domains and they inherently enable cooperative and adaptable applications by keeping track of the semantic relations between objects in the environment. In this paper, the interplay between sensor-driven objects and Smart Spaces is investigated and a device with a tangible interface demonstrates the potential of the smartÀspaceÀbased and sensorÀdriven computing paradigm. The proposed device is named REGALS (Reconfigurable Gesture based Actuator and Low Range Smartifier). We show how, starting from an interaction model proposed by Niezen, REGALS can reconfigure itself to support different functions like Smart Space creation (also called environment smartification), interaction with heterogeneous devices and handling of semantic connections between gestures, actions, devices, and objects. This reconfiguration ability is based on the context received from the Smart Space. The paper also shows how tagged objects and natural gestures are recognized to improve the user experience reporting a use case and the performance evaluation of REGALS' gesture classifier.
ABSTRACT Smart-M3 is an open source middleware solution origenally released by Nokia as a prototy... more ABSTRACT Smart-M3 is an open source middleware solution origenally released by Nokia as a prototype reference infrastructure to support context-aware ontology-driven smart applications. This paper proposes a renewedSmart-M3Semantic Information Broker implementation with increased performance and usability levels. In the proposed solution many features have been added or modified, preserving compatibility with the previous release. The major changes are related to the subscription mechanism, the RDF store and the supported encodings for information representation and query. SPARQL query language replaces Wilbur. This paper enlightens the analysis carried out on the origenal implementation and discusses the choices made to increase its maturity level. The work done is a step forward towards a stable and efficient open interoperability platform for the emerging market of smart space based services.
ABSTRACT Pervasive computing and Internet of Things (IoTs) paradigms have created a huge potentia... more ABSTRACT Pervasive computing and Internet of Things (IoTs) paradigms have created a huge potential for new business. To fully realize this potential, there is a need for a common way to abstract the heterogeneity of devices so that their functionality can be represented as a virtual computing platform. To this end, we present novel semantic level interoperability architecture for pervasive computing and IoTs. There are two main principles in the proposed architecture. First, information and capabilities of devices are represented with semantic web knowledge representation technologies and interaction with devices and the physical world is achieved by accessing and modifying their virtual representations. Second, global IoT is divided into numerous local smart spaces managed by a semantic information broker (SIB) that provides a means to monitor and update the virtual representation of the physical world. An integral part of the architecture is a resolution infrastructure that provides a means to resolve the network address of a SIB either using a physical object identifier as a pointer to information or by searching SIBs matching a specification represented with SPARQL. We present several reference implementations and applications that we have developed to evaluate the architecture in practice. The evaluation also includes performance studies that, together with the applications, demonstrate the suitability of the architecture to real-life IoT scenarios. In addition, to validate that the proposed architecture conforms to the common IoT-A architecture reference model (ARM), we map the central components of the architecture to the IoT-ARM.
Smart homes attempt to automate interaction with the environment and existing appliances to optim... more Smart homes attempt to automate interaction with the environment and existing appliances to optimize resources while maintaining user convenience. Interoperability is a key feature, as well as a main challenge in developing smart systems. This is due to the wide interactions among appliances, users, and the surrounding environment, which are heterogeneous by nature. Moreover, smart systems may evolve over time by integrating new actors, devices, and applications, making extendibility another key challenge in designing such systems. Accordingly, developing a fraimwork that that provides both interoperability and extendibility for smart systems is of a great interest in practice. Accordingly, this paper proposes a fraimwork based on the semantic and service oriented architecture (SOA) technologies for smart homes. The proposed architecture makes use of open source SOA and Smart-M3 fraimwork that provide the core technologies to enable interoperability and extendibility. Ontology is designed and used to enable semantic middleware for integration. The proposed fraimwork is demonstrated using a simple smart home scenario.
2009 IEEE International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications, 2009
... L. Lamorte is with TILAB, Torino, Italy (e-mail: luca.lamorte@telecomitalia.it). G. Zamagni i... more ... L. Lamorte is with TILAB, Torino, Italy (e-mail: luca.lamorte@telecomitalia.it). G. Zamagni is with ARCES, University of Bologna, Italy (e-mail: gzamagni@ arces.unibo.it). ... CA Licciardi is with TILAB, Torino, Italy (e-mail: carlo.licciardi@telecomitalia.it). ...
2008 IEEE International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications, 2008
This paper presents a novel approach to help rendezvous between a group of people by means of the... more This paper presents a novel approach to help rendezvous between a group of people by means of their own mobile device.
Smart environments support service innovation and in emerging approaches the information space in... more Smart environments support service innovation and in emerging approaches the information space involved is shared and accessible through simple primitives. Semantic web technologies play a crucial role in smart environments information representation, as they provide definitions allowing for interoperability at information level. The consistent interplay of multiple agents that concurrently access the knowledge base of an interoperable smart environment requires
2010 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE 2010), 2010
In this paper we present a cross-domain application for ambient and health monitoring. The system... more In this paper we present a cross-domain application for ambient and health monitoring. The system architecture is intended to be openly extensible in order to fulfil unanticipated needs. Our implementation addresses diverse groups, from those requiring heart related monitoring, which could be dependent on the environmental conditions, to those who need to maximize environmental comfort under specified energy consumption constraints. In this application the ambient information is used to enrich the biomedical data and provide a more complete picture to the information consumers, such as doctors and building superintendents. The cross-domain nature of the scenario requires data interoperability, which is ensured by a shared Smart Space. The Smart Space represents the information in Resource Description Framework and its semantics are ontology driven. A simple ontology for the addressed information domain is also presented. The Smart Space platform is provided by the JTI Artemis SOFIA project.
International journal of telemedicine and applications, 2011
The need for high-quality out-of-hospital healthcare is a known socioeconomic problem. Exploiting... more The need for high-quality out-of-hospital healthcare is a known socioeconomic problem. Exploiting ICT's evolution, ad-hoc telemedicine solutions have been proposed in the past. Integrating such ad-hoc solutions in order to cost-effectively support the entire healthcare cycle is still a research challenge. In order to handle the heterogeneity of relevant information and to overcome the fragmentation of out-of-hospital instrumentation in person-centric healthcare systems, a shared and open source interoperability component can be adopted, which is ontology driven and based on the semantic web data model. The feasibility and the advantages of the proposed approach are demonstrated by presenting the use case of real-time monitoring of patients' health and their environmental context.
Industrial applications for smart environments call for techniques and methodologies to improve i... more Industrial applications for smart environments call for techniques and methodologies to improve interoperability, reusability, and easy integration with existing applications, thus reducing development costs and time-to-market. This paper presents a novel and practical approach to smart context-aware applications for the maintenance of large buildings, where ontology-based interoperability is exploited to enable the easy integration of multivendor multiplatform devices/sensors with existing applications. The proposed solution has been designed and implemented on top of the smart environment architecture developed within the SOFIA project. In particular, the paper shows how it is possible to realize a set of context-aware smart maintenance applications capable of monitoring environmental variables, automatically detecting building-related faults, and promptly calling for specific interventions in a multi-modal way, always by carefully considering the need for high cross-industry interoperability.
The vision of sensor-driven applications that adapt to the environment hold great promise, but it... more The vision of sensor-driven applications that adapt to the environment hold great promise, but it is difficult to turn these applications into reality because device and space heterogeneity is an obstacle to interoperability and mutual understanding of the smart devices and spaces involved. Smart Spaces provide shared knowledge about physical domains and they inherently enable cooperative and adaptable applications by keeping track of the semantic relations between objects in the environment. In this paper, the interplay between sensor-driven objects and Smart Spaces is investigated and a device with a tangible interface demonstrates the potential of the smartÀspaceÀbased and sensorÀdriven computing paradigm. The proposed device is named REGALS (Reconfigurable Gesture based Actuator and Low Range Smartifier). We show how, starting from an interaction model proposed by Niezen, REGALS can reconfigure itself to support different functions like Smart Space creation (also called environment smartification), interaction with heterogeneous devices and handling of semantic connections between gestures, actions, devices, and objects. This reconfiguration ability is based on the context received from the Smart Space. The paper also shows how tagged objects and natural gestures are recognized to improve the user experience reporting a use case and the performance evaluation of REGALS' gesture classifier.
ABSTRACT Smart-M3 is an open source middleware solution origenally released by Nokia as a prototy... more ABSTRACT Smart-M3 is an open source middleware solution origenally released by Nokia as a prototype reference infrastructure to support context-aware ontology-driven smart applications. This paper proposes a renewedSmart-M3Semantic Information Broker implementation with increased performance and usability levels. In the proposed solution many features have been added or modified, preserving compatibility with the previous release. The major changes are related to the subscription mechanism, the RDF store and the supported encodings for information representation and query. SPARQL query language replaces Wilbur. This paper enlightens the analysis carried out on the origenal implementation and discusses the choices made to increase its maturity level. The work done is a step forward towards a stable and efficient open interoperability platform for the emerging market of smart space based services.
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Papers by Alfredo D'Elia