A summary

Recent research results show that building and maintaining WSN-based smart-artifact systems is still a complex and time-consuming task due to the lack of an adequate infrastructure support. To address this, we proposed a new system infrastructure called SS-ONT. Unlike previous ontology-based studies, SS-ONT particularly concerns the concepts exist in human-artifact interaction, and reflects various aspects of this domain, such as artifact property and status description (e.g., size, location, orientation), and artifact-artifact (e.g., spatial relation) and artifact-human relationships (e.g., object-related human behavior).
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SS-ONT is designed at three levels: (1) The upper ontology is a high-level ontology that provides a set of basic concepts common to different smart spaces; (2) The domain-specific ontology is an extension of the upper ontology created by adding detailed concepts and their features in different application domains (e.g., “dinner table” class and “cabinet” class in home domain); (3) Besides these two levels, we also include a third level, instance definition level or user-customization level, which allows home users to insert particular instances that exist in their home (e.g., a birthday cake and a bottle of beer, as shown above) to a domain ontology.

Part of an extension of the SS-ONT upper ontology for a smart-home domain is shown in the above figure. The current version of the SS-ONT (ver-1.5) domain ontology consists of 108 classes and 114 properties. It models a portion of the general relationships and properties associated with artifacts, people, sensors, behaviors as well as games in smart environments. The SS-ONT ontology has been widely used in our research on smart artifact systems, as reflected in related publications.

Related Publications

1. Lowering the barriers to participation in the development of human-artifact interaction systems, International Journal of Semantic Computing (IJSC)

2. Home-Explorer: Ontology-based physical artifact search and hidden object detection system, Journal of Mobile Information Systems [PDF]

SS-ONT Versions

Latest Version: SS-ONT-v1.5  

Old Versions: SS-ONT-v1.1  SS-ONT-v1.0

Please see videos at these links:

Video-1: SS-ONT Design