Smart Home Pickle

I started a mini project playing with few doors sensors and Raspberry Pi. After few agonising hours setting up the communications and getting to know Openhab application, I realised there is much more than getting few devices accentuate.

A smart home technical solution is evolutionary and has many challenges. Although it started off as a hobby , I soon found many reason to question and research the technological solutions which I thought I will employ. The focus shifted from connecting devices and firing up OpenHab smart home application for monitoring to making sure the messages and data is representative. 

Background

Any smart home solution involves integrating data from difference streams, it could be your

1. Wearable sensors 
2. Environmental sensing devices
3. Home infrastructure sensing devices

The smart home data is multi-modal and heterogeneous in nature. This heterogeneity induces interoperability issues while developing cross-domain applications, thereby restricting the possibility of reusing sensor data to develop new applications. As a solution to this, semantic approaches have been used  to tackle problems related to interoperability of sensor data.

Several ontologies have been proposed to handle different aspects of IoT-based sensor data collection, ranging from discovering the IoT sensors for data collection to applying reasoning on the collected sensor data for drawing inferences.

To satisfy user-centric service requirements, context awareness,  ontology plays an important role. It is necessary to convert the real world data into meaningful information to make decisions based on the context. 
This drew my attention to aspects of  object and service designs. A standard mechanism for object recreation not only improves the reusability of objects but also enhances service modularity and extensibility by reuse of objects with microservices. 
Reuse of objects through microservices avoids duplications, and reduces time to search and instantiate them from their registries.

The solution was to employ a standard to manage the challenges of interoperability and knowledge extraction.  My focus shifted to incorporating  Web of Objects  architectural platform for smarthome. 

The WoO supports semantic modeling of objects that provides a user-centric IoT service model with the use of a semantic ontology. The semantic ontology maintains the relationship among all the virtual objects (VOs) for information reusability.

Please check the references below for more information on The ITEA 2 Web of Objects project.


In my next blog I will try and explain the devices and the edge architecture that I used for the smart home implementation. 

References

1. Microservices in Web Objects Enabled IoT Environment for Enhancing Reusability Muhammad Aslam Jarwar ID , Muhammad Golam Kibria ID , Sajjad Ali ID and Ilyoung Chong *
2. Smart home – a challenge for architects and designers N. Bitterman∗ and D. Shach-Pinsly
3. A User-Centric Knowledge Creation Model in a Web of Object-Enabled Internet of Things EnvironmentMuhammad Golam Kibria 1, Sheik Mohammad Mostakim Fattah 1, Kwanghyeon Jeong 1, Ilyoung Chong 1,* and Youn-Kwae Jeong 2
4. https://itea3.org/project/web-of-objects.html