Wireless sensor networks in knowledge management

Research in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) necessarily touches on many research topics of Computer Science, Electronic Engineering and Telecommunication, basing on the existing work in related fields. However, the peculiarity of the WSN field is the interplay and integration of these foundation subjects, yielding a distinct topic worthy of further study in its own right. One of the main open issues in WSN research is to abstract the applications of complex low-level mechanisms, and one of the most powerful and flexible ways to achieve this is creating a Middleware layer that cover all this functionality, provide services to applications, allows the intercommunication among components, adapts dynamically to different operation modes and clearly differentiated from low-level components. Knowledge management and ontologies are also helpful when WSN are used to monitoring and taking decisions. We deploy a WSN in a testing scenario in order to control environmental parameters according to user profile stored in the system. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd.