Building Assistance Systems using Distributed Knowledge Representation

Abstract

The design of adaptive buildings requests assistance systems, which grant the intuitive integration of users and visitors into smart buildings arrangements. Such assistance systems can redound to offer user-specific monitoring information of the building services management system with selective apperceptions – auditory and visual – of complex environment situations. These systems can improve the interaction of the individual users with the technical environment by offering access to cooperative components that act and react customized to their specific preferences. Assistance systems however can boot the collateral user interaction in the sense of „Community Building“ for the common definition of goals – for example the adaption of decentralized energy consumption to the general supply situation. The assistance systems can provide decision bases or semi-autonomous behavior for decentralized – potentially just indirectly communicating users. The huge number of interaction possibilities should not lead to further interfaces with explicit handlings. Instead of that this paper proposes a modern form of implicit man-environmentcommunication. It is shown that the embedding of knowledge management methods into distributed systems enables the cooperation of device meta services. Technical devices, house establishments and internet services provide these meta services using the semantic knowledge description language OWL. The meta services communicate and synchronize with a mobile single-chip-computer with the description of the user’s own preferences. With the example of a straightforward ontology it is shown how a presence control switch is semantically modelled in description logic, how it is published and distributed within the system, aggregated at runtime and how it is used to control the actors by interfering.