Towards a universal ontology for smart environments

Abstract

The growth of ubiquitous computing and its integration in smart environments constitutes a major challenge. However, many issues related to this technology were raised, and many efforts have been made to facilitate the implementation of such technology. Information management, sharing and reuse are examples of these issues. Ontologies are used in this context as promising solution to deal with these issues. Nevertheless, ontologies developed to date in the context of smart environments are limited and do not address all aspects of smart environments such as the problem of referentiality and the environmental change. In this paper, we propose a universal ontology for smart environments aiming firstly to overcome the limitations of the existing ontologies, and secondly extend its capabilities by adding new environmental aspects such as those mentioned previously. In this paper, we also demonstrate how our ontology can be used to describe domains as well as applications.