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A multimodal semantic location service for intelligent environments: an application for Smart Hospitals

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Abstract

This paper presents semantic models, mechanisms and a service to locate mobile entities in Smart and Intelligent Environments. The key feature of the service is the semantic integration of different positioning systems that not only enables the environment to handle transparently such physical positioning systems, but also to reason on location information coming from different systems and to combine it to obtain higher context information. Indeed, the service relies on the use of ontologies and rules to define a uniform, unambiguous and well-defined model for the location information, independently of the particular positioning system. Moreover, the location service performs logic and reasoning mechanisms to provide both physical and semantic locations of mobile objects and to infer the finest granularity in the case when a mobile object is located by more than one positioning system. Finally, we present an application of the proposed approach to the case of a Smart Hospital.

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Acknowledgment

This work has been partly supported by the project “PHDS” within the “POR, Misura 3.17” funded by the Italian “Regione Campania”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Italian National Research Council, Institute for High Performance Computing and Networking, ICAR, Via Pietro Castellino 111, 80131, Naples, Italy

    Antonio Coronato, Massimo Esposito & Giuseppe De Pietro

  2. Centro Direzionale, University of Naples “Parthenope”, Isola C4, 80143, Naples, Italy

    Massimo Esposito

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  1. Antonio Coronato
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  2. Massimo Esposito
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  3. Giuseppe De Pietro
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Correspondence to Massimo Esposito.

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Coronato, A., Esposito, M. & De Pietro, G. A multimodal semantic location service for intelligent environments: an application for Smart Hospitals. Pers Ubiquit Comput 13, 527–538 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-009-0223-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-009-0223-x

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