Despite the pervasiveness of IoT domotic devices in the home automation landscape, their potential is still quite under-exploited due to the high heterogeneity and the scarce expressivity of the most commonly adopted scenario programming paradigms. The aim of this study is to show that Semantic Web technologies constitute a viable solution to tackle not only the interoperability issues, but also the overall programming complexity of modern IoT home automation scenarios. For this purpose, we developed a knowledge-based home automation system in which scenarios are the result of logical inferences over the IoT sensors data combined with formalised knowledge. In particular, we describe how the SWRL language can be employed to overcome the limitations of the well-known trigger-action paradigm. Through various experiments in three distinct scenarios, we demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed approach and its applicability in a standardised and validated context such as SAREF.
Keywords: IoT; SAREF; SWRL; cognitive systems; home automation; ontology; smart home.