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Real‐time multimedia supervisory systems generally include a distributed system that delivers live video input captured with cameras at the watched person's site, using a PC or hand‐held device at the distant supervisor's site. The system comprises many entities such as cameras for image capture, transmission software, network connections, receiver software, a display device, multimedia processing software and hardware, control software, etc. The purpose of this paper is to realize a safe and convenient supervisory system that autonomously provides users with services that fulfill users' requirements related to quality and privacy in a ubiquitous information environment.

A system is designed by integrating environmental information acquired from the real world and knowledge related to human social activities. A real space understanding mechanism is proposed to infer the situations and relationships of users by combining sensing information and social knowledge. Social knowledge related to human relationships, the life style of the watched person, home structure, etc. is used with ontology to infer the situations of users.

An early prototype was implemented for supervising elderly people and some experiments were performed based on several scenarios. Results obtained from some experiments confirmed that this supervisory system can provide real‐time multimedia supervisory services for elderly people, with reasonable quality‐of‐service and privacy that meet the users' requirements.

The system described in this paper assesses the situation of users and surrounding environmental information to provide appropriate supervisory services. This paper provides insight into the design and development of ubiquitous application systems to realize comfortable and safe services using a combination of environmental information and social knowledge.

Hybrid cloud computing is considered a viable and cost-effective approach to satisfy the inability of a private cloud to meet the user requirements. The information status of the selected public cloud service may change at runtime which should be reflected at the broker server database. This research illustrates a mechanism to assist the IaaS discovery system to assess the status change of the selected public cloud service and to update the broker server database. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A prototype was developed with the broker server as the main component in the service discovery system containing the status information of the selected public cloud service. The merge-ontology and patch-update methods were proposed, the processing cost details of each were measured, and the methods were evaluated.

Experimental results showed that in the merge update, the merging process incurred much longer time than its required communication, contributing to long overall time. Relatively, the patch update method incurred much less time than its counterpart.

The proposed mechanism is experimental with some ideal assumptions, and so further work in real conditions is needed for its improvement.

This research is believed to be the first proposal to investigate ontology merge/patch methods to support ontology update in the broker server database of a hybrid cloud and will serve as a reference to researchers in the field.