Semantic Web Technologies' Role in Smart Environments

Today semantic web technologies associated to information representation, integration and retrieval, i.e., RDF, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL and Linked Data are providing formalism, standards, shared data semantics and data integration for unstructured data over the web. These technologies are providing a transformation from the Web of Interaction to the Web of Data and actionable information. On the crossroad lies our daily lives, containing plethora of unstructured data related to daily human activities like energy consumption and environmental features such as temperature, humidity, pressure, geographical position etc. This unstructured data is originating from low cost sensors and appliances to every computational element used in our modern lives, including computers, interactive watches, mobile phones, GPS devices, gaming consoles etc. These facts accentuate an opportunity for system designers to combine these islands of data into a large actionable information space which can be utilized by automated and intelligent agents. As a result, this phenomenon is likely to institute a space that is smart enough to provide humans with comfort of living and to build an efficient society. Thus, in this context, the focus of my research has been to propose solutions to the problems in the domains of smart environment and energy management, under the umbrella of ambient intelligence. The potential role of semantic web Technologies in these proposed solutions was analyzed and architectures for these solutions were designed, implemented and tested.