Pro-active content managing system for efficient human machine interaction in data intensive environments

The informational flow in modern technological systems is intensive due to multiple embedded devices, which leads to informational overload for users, causes time lost and decreases the reliability of the performance of a human-machine system. There is a need for efficient managing of information in order to display it to a particular user accordingly to his/her current needs. This paper presents the concept of a Virtual Control Room (VCR) which is a proactive content-managing context-aware system aiming to facilitate human-machine interaction and the process of human decision/making in data intensive environments. The system collects, models, and reasons the context information and displays it in a personalized way via pro-active and adaptive multimodal Human Machine Interfaces (HMIs) on mobile devices. As a result, users can monitor and control the system from any location in a comfortable manner. The breakthrough is seen in a semantic Web based solution, which considers ontological dynamic context models with two level reasoning on top, and adaptive HMIs which support functionality on different mobile devices with introduction of modern technologies like 3D and augmented reality. The VCR concept is illustrated using two possible application domains, which are seen as important and challenging both from a socio-economic and from a technical perspective: building and manufacturing domains.