Deployment of Multimodal Services: an Ontology Driven Architecture

The relations between a physical environment and the services deployed in it are, in a large spectrum of cases, defined by the functional aspects of the environment, coming from its role and use in the human society. Examples of such environments are hospitals, schools, administration offices, museums, department stores, etc.; users can effectively interact with the available services if services are deployed in proper locations and accessible with interaction modalities close to users' expectation. In an ideal design situation, all the components of a service populated environment should be defined and configured with synergy, designing at the same time the physical infrastructure and the services. In real cases, the designer of a complex interactive application faces a number of constraints due to the pre-existing infrastructure, which affects the deployment of services, hence the user interaction capabilities. We discuss a deployment methodology and architecture based on a semantic description of environments and services, expressed by a hierarchy of ontologies. The ontologies describe the relations between the user activity, the services and the functional properties of the environment places.