Leveraging Semantic Technologies towards Social Ambient Intelligence

Abstract

At a time when the amount of information grows exponentially on the Internet, when most people can be connected at all times with powerful personal devices, we need to enhance, adapt and simplify access to information and communication with other people. The vision of ambient intelligence which is a relevant solution, brings many challenges in the domain of contextawareness, adaptive human-system interaction, privacy enforcement and social communications. We believe that ontologies and other semantic technologies can help to meet most of these challenges in a unified manner, as they are a bridge between meaningful (but fuzzy by nature) human knowledge and digital information systems. In this chapter, we review several utilizations of semantic technologies for context management, adaptive human-system interaction, privacy enforcement and social communications in the scope of ubiquitous computing. Based on identified benefits and lacks, we propose several research leads towards the realization of a unified ubiquitous system based on the social web and semantic technologies.