An Ontology-Driven Digital Twin for Hotel Front Desk: Real-Time Integration of Wearables and OCC Camera Events via a Property-Defined REST API

Abstract

This article presents an ontology-driven Digital Twin (DT) for hotel front-desk operations that fuses two real-time data streams: (i) physiological and activity signals from wrist-worn wearables assigned to staff, and (ii) 3D people-positioning and occupancy events captured by reception-area cameras using a proprietary implementation of Optical Camera Communication (OCC). Building on a previously proposed front-desk ontology, the semantic model is extended with positional events, zone semantics, and wearable-derived workload indices to estimate queue state, staff workload, and service demand in real time. A vendor-agnostic, property-based REST API specifies the DT interface in terms of observable properties, including authentication and authorization, idempotent ingestion, timestamp conventions, version negotiation, integrity protection for signed webhooks, rate limiting and backoff, pagination and filtering, and privacy-preserving identifiers, enabling any compliant backend to implement the specification. The proposed layered architecture connects ingestion, spatial reasoning, and decision services to dashboards and key performance indicators (KPIs). This article details the positioning pipeline (calibration, normalized 3D coordinates, zone mapping, and confidence handling), the wearable workload pipeline, and an evaluation protocol covering localization error, zone classification, queue-length estimation, and workload accuracy. The results indicate that a spatially aware, ontology-based DT can support more balanced staff allocation and improved guest experience while remaining technology-agnostic and privacy-conscious.