Digital Home Networking

Chapter 5

Personalization and Home Context

5.1. Introduction

Nowadays, users want more and more advanced applications, not only accessible from anywhere and at anytime, but also that suit their needs, whatever they are. The goal of home context modeling and service personalization is precisely to help users to customize the services and devices they have. That is, to provide the users with the ability to customize a product or a service in order to maximize the benefits they get from the services and to minimize the hard work often required for their understanding and usage.

First, this chapter pretends to offer an overview of the main standards and recommendations proposed to design personalization systems and context manager systems, highlighting the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) work within this standardization, considered as the main reference. Then, a description of the way these standards and recommendations have been integrated and applied to a Digital Homes personalization engine is also given.

Second, this chapter will illustrate the importance of context information, describing the different mechanisms that can be used not only to define a particular context but also to query it. Afterwards, a context manager architecture for Digital Homes will be presented, detailing the different interface layers that can be used to interact with it.

Finally, we will introduce the Protégé ontology editor, which was used to develop the personalization ontology ...