Robust solutions for ambient assisted living are numerous, yet predominantly specific in their scope of usability. In this paper, we describe the potential contribution of semantic web technologies to building more versatile solutions -- a step towards adaptable context-aware engines and simplified deployments. Our conception and deployment work in hindsight, we highlight some implementation challenges and requirements for semantic web tools that would help to ease the development of context-aware services and thus generalize real-life deployment of semantically driven assistive technologies. We also compare available tools with regard to these requirements and validate our choices by providing some results from a real-life deployment.