An ontology-based approach to integrate TV and IoT middlewares

Internet of Things (IoT) is the interconnection of physical devices, known of smart objects, that share data and collaborate among them to support users. There are IoT usage scenarios in several domains. In-home domain, the use of smart objects may support monitoring and automation of the environment. In a home, the TV is one of the most used devices. It may also collaborate with the smart objects to enhance the interactive experience of viewers on watching. To support such a meeting, we propose an (i) conceptual model, IoTTV-Ont, that allows modeling entire homes, with smart objects, people’ profile, and viewers’ interaction events with TV applications; (ii) a software architecture that integrates and interoperates digital TV and IoT middleware. This architecture allows the TV applications: to be aware of the physical environment context, to change aspects of the physical environment, to identify the viewers, and to receive multimodal interactions performed by viewers. We demonstrate our work through use cases. For this, we implement a prototype of our software architecture and modeled home using IoTTV-Ont. Then we developed usage scenarios that enhance TV viewers’ experience by supporting features such as content adaptation, multi-sensorial immersive experience, and multimodal user interaction.