AN ONTOLOGY-ENHANCED SOA-BASED HOME INTEGRATION PLATFORM FOR THE WELL-BEING OF INHABITANTS Yohanes Baptista Dafferianto Trinugroho, Frank Reichert and Rune Fensli Faculty of Engineering and Science, University of Agder - Jon Lilletuns vei 9, 4879 Grimstad, Norway ABSTRACT Smart homes are expected to provide better services to inhabitants, supporting independence especially to elderly people in living their lives. Home automation system plays an important role in supporting the well-being of inhabitants, reducing necessary human interventions in achieving different tasks. Sensors, actuators, and various devices are required to be installed in smart homes to provision context-aware services. This paper presents a home integration platform architecture based on Service-Oriented Architecture paradigm that can be used to integrate the functionalities of different devices. A proposed ontology to enhance the automated reasoning process is also presented, and several example scenarios related to safety and security at home utilising the Semantic Web Rule Language rules are described as well. KEYWORDS eHealth, smart home, SOA, Web Services, integration platform, ontology 1. INTRODUCTION The role of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is becoming more crucial in home environments, especially for supporting elderly inhabitants. Home automation system should be able to control various devices installed at home, turning the aforementioned homes to so-called smart homes. Smart homes are also envisaged to enable healthcare providers to provide remote patient monitoring and care, which can potentially reduce the required time for patients to stay at the healthcare premises. From this standpoint, smart homes will provide more independence to elderly people in living their lives with minimum interventions. Integrating various different devices (including sensors and actuators) in a smart home can be challenging, especially when different vendors are involved in the process. Redundant and overlapping functionalities between different devices may exist with very limited reusability in different services being provided to the inhabitants. To solve this issue, a service-oriented approach is proposed to promote reusability and interoperability, as its loosely coupled nature allows integration of legacy and existing systems in granular way that can easily accommodate changing needs. The adoption of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) (Barry, 2003) paradigm in a smart home will provide a unified way of combining and using data from various devices, providing a standard way to develop and compose services. As automated decision making is of great importance in a smart home environment, a knowledge base containing real-time information and context of different entities in the smart home should be present. This knowledge base has to be updated whenever any condition of the entities is changed, then reasoned upon by the home automation system to make correct decisions. Ontology is an approach for storing and managing knowledge base that can be used in a smart home environment. It can also be used to model and store contexts. This paper, which is based on an ongoing research project, proposes a SOA-based home integration platform architecture that is enhanced by incorporating an ontology for modelling contexts of different entities in a smart home environment. Some scenarios related to safety and security of inhabitants are also discussed with corresponding rules for automated reasoning. IADIS International Conference e-Health 2012 159