Towards Collaborative Management of Semantic Business Rules: An Intelligent Environment Case
Nowadays we are facing an increasing challenge of smart environment automation, which is the use of information technology to control the available smart objects that comprise it. During the last decade several models of intelligent environments have been proposed. In order to operate in a dynamic environment, e.g. a smart home, devices must operate in a context-aware manner.
In this thesis we adopt an ontology-oriented approach as a modeling technique for context-aware applications. We propose a method for the collaborative construction of Semantic Decision Tables (SDT) to manage semantic business rules over ontologies. More precisely, we adopt and extend the GOSPL tool for ontology engineering to facilitate the collaborative construction of SDTs. We furthermore implement an important component for this method, which is the mobile SDT editor. This component works as a rule configurator in an Android environment giving users the ability to create and use personalized semantics. The latter are used for the evolution of the collaborative construction of SDTs. To illustrate the proposed method we present a use case scenario for a smart home environment. Our method and tools facilitate on the one hand the collaborative constructions of rules inside GOSPL communities, and on the other hand, the extension of these rules by the SDT editor users for personalized semantics.