Model and Ontology-Based Development of Smart Space Applications

The semantic data models and ontologies have shown themselves as very useful technologies for the environments where heterogeneous devices need to share information, to utilize services of each other, and to participate as components in different applications. The work in this chapter extends this approach so that the software development process for such environments is also ontology-driven. The objective is i) to support the incremental development, ii) to partially automate the development in order to make it easier and faster, and iii) to raise the level of abstraction of the application development high enough so that even people without a software engineering background would be able to develop simple applications. This chapter describes an incremental development process for the smart space application development. For this process, a supporting tool called Smart Modeler is introduced, which provides i) a visual modeling environment for smart space applications and ii) a framework and core interfaces for extensions supporting both the model and the ontology-driven development. These extensions are capable of creating model elements from ontology-based information, discovering and reusing both the software components and the partial models through a repository mechanism supported by semantic metadata, and generating executable program code from the models.