María José Santofimia Romero - Grupo ARCO - Universidad de ...

called common-sense knowledge. Additionally, inference and reasoning mechanisms also need tobe provided in order to be able to derive new information out of the existing knowledge and theinformation about the ongoing situation.At the risk of being too pretentious and ambitious, this work pretends to propose a comprehensivesolution to Ambient Intelligence that considers common sense as a constituent part of it. For the sakeof precision, the aforementioned goals are detailed in the following specific goals:1. To capture and model the specific common-sense knowledge that is directly involved in AmbientIntelligence. Special attention should be paid to the knowledge involved in modelingactions and events. Note that this aim is basically constrained to the knowledge that is somehowrelated to Ambient Intelligence. It is unfeasible to undertake the task of modeling the largeamount of knowledge that people normally hold.2. To support the context modeling and reasoning. The sensed information should be translatedinto semantic facts. These facts should be considered along with the knowledge that describeshow things work in order to draw further knowledge about the ongoing situation or circumstances.3. To devise a model of agency for Ambient Intelligence systems. This model is intended to providethe beliefs and goals that determine the direction towards which the Ambient Intelligencesystem responses should be directed.4. To provide an automatic service composition mechanism that supports the behavioral responseimplementation of the Ambient Intelligence system. On the one hand, the system goals andbeliefs determine the best way to proceed while on the other hand the automatic service compositionmechanism enables the system to undertake the devised responses.5. To leverage common-sense knowledge and reasoning capabilities in the automatic service composition.Some common-sense aspects concerning the effects of events are particularly relevantfor a deep understanding of the ongoing situation, as well as for the implementation of the devisedbehavioral response.6. To investigate the most appropriate means to capture and manage the context events as a requirementfor context understanding.The first items should be clearly undertaken from the perspective of a knowledge engineeringtask; in order to interpret contextual information, it is necessary to structure and organize the gatheredknowledge as well as to semantically enhance it. On the basis of such semantically enhanced facts,new knowledge can be inferred or deduced. It has to be noted that this aim poses the demand for anadequate language and a reasoning system.The semantic enhancement of the contextual information might not be enough to understandcertain aspects. Understanding a situation that takes place in a context might involve, for example,the inference of implicit, non-deterministic or delayed effects.The third point is closely related to the agent theory. It has to be remarked that the ability toreplicate human reasoning remains one of the main objectives in the Artificial Intelligence field. Inthis regard, intelligent agents have came to be a powerful solution to this issue, and therefore, it mightbe an appropriate starting point from which to tackle this goal.13