Future House Project – Component: Personal Cyber Agent

During the last few days our team has worked on the idea of smart home technology (intelligence seams to be a too strong term at the moment). Our approach covers the higher level control of low level systems, such as light intensity, temperature, device data and other user context information gained from the house scenario. Concrete that means we work on a central control unit that is able to collect all relevant data, evaluate and classify them and reason about it. The concrete scenarios are not quiet clear at the moment, but there is a intensive ongoing discussion about it what we are able to do with the current technology. The used technology is the LOD model (Linked Open Data) in combination with the own, house intern, semantic data sets. If needed (not sure at the moment) RDF/OWL is extended with other, more powerful, ontologies.

The current sub project of the “Future House” project is called “Personal Cyber Agent”, shortly pca. The main goal of this component is to collect the data and to perform reasoning steps to automatically react on user preferences. The current focus is to build a stable base software system that is able to collect and return the information in a suitable and secure manner. For this purpose the underlying communication layer uses the SOAP protocol specification in combination with RDF/OWL data and WS-Security (WSSE). Through high security needs the authentication, authorization and encryption, signature is build on the base of X.509 certificates.

The achieved goals sounds at the moment very naive in relation with the major goal, but the current work is used as base system for all future development. With the help of the modular architecture it should be very flexible for extension. That makes the reasoning part independent from the underlying technology, such as KNX (EN 50090, ISO/IEC 14543).

PCA – Source Code

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About Alex Oberhauser

Alex Oberhauser’s current private and professional interests are Research and Development in the area of Semantic Web and Service Oriented Architecture with the focus on the applicability of new technologies in real world scenarios. He is founder of the meta project Networld and the Crisis Information Platform Sigimera (http://www.sigimera.org).

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