Ontology-Based Representation of UPnP Devices and Services for Dynamic Context-Aware Ubiquitous Computing Applications

Ontology and related technologies have been introduced into the Ambient Intelligence domain as a mean to provide declarative formal representations of the domain knowledge. The range of devices available in the scope of an Ambient Intelligence space becomes increasingly heterogeneous and at the same time ubiquitous. Hence there is a need to link the discovery, description and deployment of these ambient devices and their services with context and domain knowledge representations in order to facilitate an Ambient Intelligence space experience. The contribution of this work is an approach for bridging the gap between the non-semantic description mechanisms of XML based devices description protocols, such as UPnP, and the AmI domain knowledge representation. For this we design a prototype ontology-based representation for UPnP devices and services that provide a semantic linking between human-centric abstract description, and the software-centric concrete description that derives from the UPnP descriptors and is necessary to remotely execute method calls on devices. We also demonstrate the benefits of its use with a prototype implementation.