A Semantic-Enabled Platform for Realizing an Interoperable Web of Things

Abstract

Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem is experiencing a lack of interoperability across the multiple competing platforms that are available. Consequently, service providers can only access vertical data silos that imply high costs and jeopardize their solutions market potential. It is necessary to transform the current situation with competing non-interoperable IoT platforms into a common ecosystem enabling the emergence of cross-platform, cross-standard, and cross-domain IoT services and applications. This paper presents a platform that has been implemented for realizing this vision. It leverages semantic web technologies to address the two key challenges in expanding the IoT beyond product silos into web-scale open ecosystems: data interoperability and resources identification and discovery. The paper provides extensive description of the proposed solution and its implementation details. Regarding the implementation details, it is important to highlight that the platform described in this paper is currently supporting the federation of eleven IoT deployments (from heterogeneous application domains) with over 10,000 IoT devices overall which produce hundreds of thousands of observations per day.

A Proposed Framework for Context-Aware Semantic Service Provisioning

“…Nowadays the ecosystem of the IoT is currently facing a lack in terms of interoperability among the various competing platforms that are presently accessible [16].…”

A Survey on the Web of Things

“…Directory-based discovery solutions exploit the capabilities of a directory component, which is mainly characterized by two main functionalities: (i) the registry, i.e., the possibility to store and retrieve resources through data queries, and (ii) a subscribe mechanism that allows clients to be notified as soon as new resources are registered to the directory. Regarding the first functionality, we cite the platform in [90] which consists on a semantic web-enabled repository providing platform independent APIs based upon semantically enriched metadata. The platform supports RDF-based IoT data sharing and retrieval across heterogeneous platforms as well as the registration of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) as entry points of the WTs acting as proxies for physical and abstract entities.…”

“…Finally, we cite the meta-platform in [89] which enables an Experiment-As-A-Service (EaaS) paradigm for IoT/WoT experiments. The tool supports the federation of heterogeneous IoT testbeds from the Fiesta-IoT project [1] thanks to the specification of a common Testbed API and the usage of a shared IoT registry [90] enabling the exchange of information in a semantically annotated format.…”

IoT-Stream: A Lightweight Ontology for Internet of Things Data Streams and Its Use with Data Analytics and Event Detection Services

“…Triple stores are suitable for storing finite information about entities, but not so for time-series data that are associated with them. In the case of time-series data, as more data are accumulated to a dataset, triple stores begin to struggle to respond to queries within reasonable periods, for example as evaluated in [40]. If an atomic annotation is required, then a StreamObservation dataset needs to be separated from the rest of the metadata, except its link to the IoTStream it belongsTo.…”