Understanding events relationally and temporally related: context assessment strategies for a smart home

This paper elaborates on context assessment strategies for smart homes and, in a broader perspective, for context-aware cognitive systems. The proposed framework, which is inspired by a cognitive theory called Functionalism, is aimed at integrating ontology and logic approaches to context modeling. Two are the assumptions underlying the model: (i) the availability of an ontology (i.e., a "context-role" representation of what exists in a given domain); (ii) a simple inference schema (i.e., subsumption between concepts). The context model is formally defined adopting a structural approach, which describes contexts and situations as recursive structures grounded with respect to the ontology. Examples are presented to discuss the proposed model.