A top-level ontology for smart environments

Recognising human activities is a problem characteristic of a wider class of systems in which algorithms interpret multi-modal sensor data to extract semantically meaningful classifications. Machine learning techniques have demonstrated progress, but the lack of underlying formal semantics impedes the potential for sharing and reusing classifications across systems. We present a top-level ontology model that facilitates the capture of domain knowledge. This model serves as a conceptual backbone when designing ontologies, linking the meaning implicit in elementary information to higher-level information that is of interest to applications. In this way it provides the common semantics for information at different levels of granularity that supports the communication, reuse and sharing of ontologies between systems. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.