A semantic approach for building sentient spaces

Abstract

Large and pervasive sensing, communications, and computing infrastructures are enabling the realization of sentient spaces. Sentient spaces expose to applications the state of people and other entities in a given physical space. Sentient spaces enable multiple types of applications including those for enhancing collaboration among office co-workers and emergency response applications. Enabling such applications, however, encompasses a set of challenges. First, building these applications from scratch is an almost impossible task. There is a large amount of heterogeneous sensors, computers, and networks. Second, since the infrastructure is to be shared by different types of applications and users, it is imperative to achieve a just and wise usage of the resources, which includes protecting the privacy of the people being monitored. This dissertation proposes embedding space and application semantics into the middleware and focuses on (i) the overall design and implementation of such a middleware, (ii) mechanisms to model a sentient space and its applications as well as mechanisms to translate SQL-like continuous queries based on these semantic models to transformations on sensor streams, and (iii) mechanisms to modify the query answers such that privacy is not violated.