Ontologies' Definition for Modeling the Cabin Comfort on Cruise Ships

The evolution of sea cruiser research considers the possibility to provide more comfortable cabins to the passengers. This goal can be achieved by providing the sea cruiser with the possibility to acquire, manage, and reason over data deriving from the cabin environment, its passengers, and their activities. A promising approach to deal with the information belonging to these domains is represented by Semantic Web technologies, in particular the exploitation of ontologies. The use of these technologies can provide, from the one hand, a sound model of the comfort metrics to be enforced inside the cabin, while on the other hand it leverages the exploitation of reasoning processes in order to adjust comfort metrics to passengers' desires. This work describes a set of domain ontologies developed to address these purposes; starting from a motivating scenario, the paper illustrates how domain knowledge can be modelled to take into account the passenger's desires, limits and activities in relation to the comfort metrics provided by the cabin. Furthermore, the work provides some examples on how reasoning processes can infer new knowledge and provide changes in the cabin environment.