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DOG is a Domotic OSGi Gateway able to expose different domotic networks as a single, technology neutral, home automation system. The adoption of a standard framework such as OSGi, and of sophisticated modeling techniques stemming from the Semantic Web research community, allows DOG to go beyond simple automation and to support reasoning-based intelligence inside home environments. By exploiting automatic device generalization, syntactic and semantic command validation, and inter-network scenario definition, DOG provides the building blocks for supporting the evolution of current, isolated, home automation plants into socalled Intelligent Domotic Environments, where heterogeneous devices and domotic systems are coordinated to behave as a single, intelligent, proactive system.

DogOnt is a novel modeling language for IDEs (Intelligent Domotic Environment), based on Semantic Web technologies. By adopting well known representations such as ontologies and by providing suitable reasoning facilities, DogOnt is able to face interoperation issues allowing to describe:

• where a domotic device is located;
• the set of capabilities of a domotic device;
• the technology-specific features needed to interface the device;
• the possible configurations that the device can assume;
• how the home environment is composed;
• what kind of architectural elements and furniture are placed inside the home.

This information can then be leveraged by inference-based intelligent systems to provide advanced functionality required in Intelligent Domotic Environments. DogOnt is composed of two elements: the DogOnt ontology, expressed in OWL, which allows to formalize all the aspects of a IDE, and the DogOnt rules, which ease the modeling process by automatically generating proper states and functionalities for domotic devices, and by automatically associating them to the corresponding device instances through semantic relationships. DogOnt is currently adopted to provide house modeling and reasoning capabilities to a domotic gateway called DOG (Domotic OSGi Gateway), which is under development in the authors’ research group and that will be distributed as open source toolkit for building IDEs running on low cost PCs. In this context, a third component of DogOnt, namely DogOnt queries, not presented in this paper, supports runtime control of the IDE.

We are conducting a survey for understanding what users expect from their intelligent homes. Imagine your home is listening to you for helping doing everyday tasks... what would you ask to it?
This section shows the responses gathered until now