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An Ontology for Proactive Indoor Environmental Quality Monitoring and Control

Published: 28 September 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Proactive monitoring and control of indoor air quality in homes where there are pregnant mothers and infants is essential for healthy development and well-being of children. This is especially true in low income households where cooking practices and exposure to harmful pollutants produced by nearby industries can negatively impact on a healthy home environment. Interdisciplinary expert knowledge is required to make sense of dynamic and complex environmental phenomena from multivariate low level sensor observations and high level human activities to detect health risks and enact decisions about control. We have developed an ontology for indoor environmental quality monitoring and control based on an ongoing real world case study in Durban, South Africa. We implemented an Indoor Air Quality Index and a thermal comfort index which can be automatically determined by reasoning on the ontology. We evaluated the ontology by populating it with test sensor data and showing how it can be queried to analyze health risk situations and determine control actions. Our evaluation shows that the ontology can be used for real world indoor monitoring and control applications in resource constrained settings.

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SAICSIT '15: Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Research Conference on South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists
September 2015
423 pages
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Published: 28 September 2015

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Author Tags

  1. Air Quality Index
  2. Indoor Environmental Quality
  3. Ontology
  4. Pollutants
  5. Pollution

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SAICSIT '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 43 of 119 submissions, 36%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 187 of 439 submissions, 43%

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