Ontology for a Panoptes building: exploiting contextual information and a smart camera network

The contextual information in the built environment is highly heterogeneous, it goes from static information (e.g., information about the building structure) to dynamic information (e.g., user's space-time information, sensors detections and events that occurred). This paper proposes to semantically fuse the building's contextual information with extracted data from a smart camera network by using ontologies and semantic web technologies. The developed ontology allows interoperability between the different contextual data and enables, without human interaction, real-time event detections and system reconfiguration to be performed. The use of semantic knowledge in multi-camera monitoring systems guarantees the protection of the user's privacy by not sending nor saving any image, just extracting the knowledge from them. This paper presents a new approach to develop an "all-seeing" smart building, where the global system is the first step to attempt to provide Artificial Intelligence (AI) to a building.