Introduction to Application Development for Smart Environments

Course details

Smart environments refer to user environments that are equipped with variety of devices, sensors, and actuators that cooperate to provide the user with the maximum possible convenience, safety, security, and comfort. Homes, offices, hospitals, schools, malls, or any other spaces can be enriched with smart features to make it more reactive and responsive to the context. In a smart hospital scenario, for example, RFID tags can be attached to patients, drug packages, blood bags, and medical equipment. Physicians and nurses can access patients’ medical records saved on their RFID tags when necessary via their handheld devices equipped with RFID readers. Through this identification, correct operations can be ensured to the correct patient. Matching patient data to the blood bag data can minimize the risk of patients receiving the wrong type of blood. These simple use cases and many others can show that enabling smartness and intelligence is not a luxury, but rather, it is becoming a necessity to improve and even save people’s lives. 

SMART-M3 is an open source architecture that facilitates the development of such smart environment applications. It exploits the semantic technology to manage heterogeneous data collected from enormous sources in the environment and having widely different representations. In addition, SMART-M3 can help in improving system extendibility and simplifying the integration of new data sources or changing the way, by which data is being processed.

SMEs can tap into new business opportunities by exploiting such open source architectures to develop applications for smart environments to solve pressing societal problems.

This course aims at introducing the attendees to the basic concept of smart environments. The course provides practical hands-on experience in using SMART-M3 architecture to develop smart environment applications.

Topics to be covered

• Technology drivers for modern computing
• Challenges in developing applications for smart environments
• Introduction to semantic smart spaces and the SMART-M3 architecture
• SMART-M3 architecture core concepts
  • Semantic Information Broker (SIB)
  • Resource Description Framework (RDF)
  • Web Ontology Language (OWL)
  • SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL)
  • Knowledge Processors (KPs) and Knowledge Processor Interfaces (KPIs)
• Design and development hands-on sessions to practice:
• Semantic infrastructure configuration
• Requirements representation using ontology concepts
• Information storage using RDF and retrieval using SPARQL
• Semantic-based application development