Situation-Aware Ambient Assisted Living and Ambient Intelligence Data Integration for Efficient Eldercare - E-Healthcare Systems and Wireless Communications - page 338

Figure 10. SENIOR architecture blueprint

plausibility, can be done. Multiple sensor data
sources can be combined to virtual objects . Vir-
tual objects can be compared with the concept of
logical sensors explained in (Baldauf, Dustdar,
& Rosenberg, 2007). For example, a component
can track the position of a resident using noise
and movement sensors and provide this informa-
tion via a virtual object named “location” in the
database.
Within the modeling domain, ontologies are
used to describe data and the relations between
them. The SENIOR framework defines a core
ontology that provides the basic elements for
describing situations, i.e. objects, attributes and
relations among them. The core ontology serves
as basis for a domain specific AAL ontology
which can be freely adapted to the environmental
prerequisites - elements that are perceived from
the real AAL world (devices, person tracking, or
vital signs). Related ontologies can be integrated
or defined and automatically benefit from the

situation awareness concepts available in the core
ontology. The ontology is described in OWL for
several reasons: (iii) OWL is widespread and has
reached a feasible maturity level, (iii) sophisticated
tool support is available, (iii) there are plenty of
OWL ontology definitions which can be re-used,
and (iv) OWL provides a description logic (OWL-
DL) that can be used by inference machines to
query RDF data.
The methodologies and concepts of the mod-
eling world allow the definition of situations,
which can be found by using inference mecha-
nisms from the reasoning world. Due to the fact,
that reasoning statements are difficult to read for
human beings most inference machines provide
alternative notations for formulating expressions.
These alternative notations are mostly based on
logical query languages, which allow to formulate
expressions in a concise syntax, but do not allow to
describe triggered actions (raise an alarm, inform
care personnel, display messages). To provide this