The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to extending the Internet to devices such as home appliances, consumer electronics, and sensor networks. As multiple heterogeneous devices attempt to create area networks, one of the major challenges is the interoperability and com-posability of their services. The traditional way to address interoperability is to define standards; however, there are many standards and specifications that are incompatible with each other. In this paper we propose an application layer solution for interoperability. The key idea is to utilize device semantics provided by existing specifications and dynamically wrap them in our middleware into semantic services. Next, with the help of Semantic Web technologies, users can create and then execute complex tasks involving multiple heterogeneous devices. We demonstrate how our framework automates interoperability without any modifications to existing standards, devices, or technologies, while providing to the user an intuitive semantic interface with services that can be executed by combining devices in the network.

Semantic middleware for the Internet of Things

Mobile Cloud Computing is widely accepted as a concept that can significantly improve the user experience when accessing mobile services. By removing the limitations of mobile devices with respect to storage and computing capabilities and providing a new level of security by a centralized maintenance of security-critical software for e.g. mobile payment applications, it is expected that it will find broad acceptance on the business as well as consumer side. Research indicates [1] that Mobile Cloud Computing will additionally help to make visions of context services become reality. However, Mobile Cloud Computing concepts rely on an always-on connectivity and will need to provide a scalable and - when requested - quality mobile access. ”Intelligent access” schemes meeting these requirements will be discussed in this paper. They exploit the specific information available by the ”Mobile Cloud Controller”, i.e., theusers’ location, context, and requested services, and significantly evolve the Heterogeneous Access Management schemes developed for the traditional heterogeneous access scenarios. In order to evaluate the performance of these intelligent radio access management concepts in the framework of mobile cloud computing, a specialized radio network simulator will be introduced. It will be shown that a Mobile Cloud Controller establishing a Context Management Architecture can provide the requested availability and quality of mobile connectivity.

Access Schemes for Mobile Cloud Computing

New services such as Facebook Platform, Google Friend Connect, and MySpacelD let third-party sites develop social applications without having to build their own social network. These social-networks connect services increase access to and enrich user data in the Social Web, although they also present several security and privacy challenges.

Social-Networks Connect Services

Lifestyle is a key determinant in the prevention and management of chronic diseases. If we would exercise regularly, eat healthy, control our weight, sleep enough, manage stress, not smoke and use alcohol only moderately, 90% of type II diabetes, 80% of coronary heart disease, and 70% of stroke could be prevented. Health statistics show that lifestyle related diseases are increasing at an alarming rate. Public health promotion campaigns and healthcare together are not effective enough to stop this "tsunami". The solution that is offered is to empower people to manage their health with the assistance of ICT-enabled services. A lot of R&D and engineering effort is being invested in Personal Health Systems. Although some progress has been made, the market for such systems has not yet emerged. The aim of this critical review is to identify the barriers which are holding back the growth of the market. It looks into the theoretical foundations of behavior change support, the maturity of the technologies for behavior change support, and the business context in which behavior change support systems are used.

Rethinking Health: ICT-Enabled Services to Empower People to Manage Their Health

Mobile technology-based interventions for adult users of alcohol: A systematic review of the literature

The acceptance of next-generation mobile communication systems depends to a large extent on the services and applications that can be offered to customers. Tailoring the services to actual user needs is considered to be crucial for the success of future wireless technology. The individual user, "I", has to be put in the center of service provisioning. In this article, we report the work developed by the Working Group 2 of the Wireless World Research Forum on a service infrastructure framework for the future wireless world. Major service capabilities such as personalization, ambient awareness, and adaptability are described along with a reference model focusing in I-centric communication.

I-centric communications: personalization, ambient awareness, and adaptability for future mobile services

Context-aware adaptive systems aim at automatically personalizing the user's environment depending on the user's situation, and hence, minimizing user interaction with the system. We present a novel user profile ontology that is dedicated to describe situation-dependent sub-profiles. This ontology can be used by context-aware adaptive service platforms for mobile communication and information services to automatically trigger the situation-dependent personalization of services. The design of this novel ontology also takes into consideration recommendations from the human factors research area. In particular, the ontology enables the easy specification of situational conditions and situation-dependent user sub-profiles.

UPOS: User Profile Ontology with Situation-Dependent Preferences Support

Ontologies will be crucial for the future development of Next Generation Service Delivery Platforms. While various projects have defined ontologies for the mobile domain, there is yet little agreement on a common semantic model. One reason is the intrinsically hard problem of finding, using, mapping and evolving already existing ontologies. In this paper we present the Mobile Ontology, an effort within the IST project SPICE to converge towards a standardized ontology. Our approach is based on a minimal core ontology that defines common concepts for sub-ontologies of relevant domains and that is easily extensible towards existing and future ontologies. It is our intention to make this ontology available to other projects and collaboratively work on standardized ontology for the mobile domain.

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Mobile Ontology: Towards a Standardized Semantic Model for the Mobile Domain

Mobile environments, the Web, services, semantics, converge in the physical world forming a shared communication sphere. To ensure context-enabled interoperation on service platforms in such a sphere, developers need to have a shared specification of objects belonging to the sphere and their roles. We present context acquisition, context representation, context enabling and use in mobile service platforms, outline the main ontological enablers of the shared communication sphere, and illustrate their added value with a scenario.

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Context Acquisition, Representation and Employment in Mobile Service Platforms

We present a user profile management component for ubiquitous computing environments that provides management, inquiry and delivery of context-dependent user preferences. In particular, our approach takes into account that users act differently depending on their current context, and hence, that a user can be described by different submodels that represent the user's preferences within different contexts. Furthermore, our approach takes into account that different applications usually adhere to different semantics

Olaf Droegehorn

Papers

I-centric communications: personalization, ambient awareness, and adaptability for future mobile services

UPOS: User Profile Ontology with Situation-Dependent Preferences Support

Mobile Ontology: Towards a Standardized Semantic Model for the Mobile Domain

Context Acquisition, Representation and Employment in Mobile Service Platforms

Managing and Delivering Context-Dependent User Preferences in Ubiquitous Computing Environments