A study of existing Ontologies in the IoT-domain

Several domains have adopted the increasing use of IoT-based devices to collect sensor data for generating abstractions and perceptions of the real world. This sensor data is multi-modal and heterogeneous in nature. This heterogeneity induces interoperability issues while developing cross-domain applications, thereby restricting the possibility of reusing sensor data to develop new applications. As a solution to this, semantic approaches have been proposed in the literature to tackle problems related to interoperability of sensor data. Several ontologies have been proposed to handle different aspects of IoT-based sensor data collection, ranging from discovering the IoT sensors for data collection to applying reasoning on the collected sensor data for drawing inferences. In this paper, we survey these existing semantic ontologies to provide an overview of the recent developments in this field. We highlight the fundamental ontological concepts (e.g., sensor-capabilities and context-awareness) required for an IoT-based application, and survey the existing ontologies which include these concepts. Based on our study, we also identify the shortcomings of currently available ontologies, which serves as a stepping stone to state the need for a common unified ontology for the IoT domain.Comment: Submitted to Elsevier JWS SI on Web semantics for the Internet/Web of Thing

Semantics for incident identification and resolution reports

In order to achieve a safe and systematic treatment of security protocols, organizations release a number of technical briefings describing how to detect and manage security incidents. A critical issue is that this document set may suffer from semantic deficiencies, mainly due to ambiguity or different granularity levels of description and analysis. An approach to face this problem is the use of semantic methodologies in order to provide better Knowledge Externalization from incident protocols management. In this article, we propose a method based on semantic techniques for both, analyzing and specifying (meta)security requirements on protocols used for solving security incidents. This would allow specialist getting better documentation on their intangible knowledge about them.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-41086-

The Landscape of Ontology Reuse Approaches

Ontology reuse aims to foster interoperability and facilitate knowledge reuse. Several approaches are typically evaluated by ontology engineers when bootstrapping a new project. However, current practices are often motivated by subjective, case-by-case decisions, which hamper the definition of a recommended behaviour. In this chapter we argue that to date there are no effective solutions for supporting developers' decision-making process when deciding on an ontology reuse strategy. The objective is twofold: (i) to survey current approaches to ontology reuse, presenting motivations, strategies, benefits and limits, and (ii) to analyse two representative approaches and discuss their merits

Semantic modelling of user interests based on cross-folksonomy analysis

The continued increase in Web usage, in particular participation in folksonomies, reveals a trend towards a more dynamic and interactive Web where individuals can organise and share resources. Tagging has emerged as the de-facto standard for the organisation of such resources, providing a versatile and reactive knowledge management mechanism that users find easy to use and understand. It is common nowadays for users to have multiple profiles in various folksonomies, thus distributing their tagging activities. In this paper, we present a method for the automatic consolidation of user profiles across two popular social networking sites, and subsequent semantic modelling of their interests utilising Wikipedia as a multi-domain model. We evaluate how much can be learned from such sites, and in which domains the knowledge acquired is focussed. Results show that far richer interest profiles can be generated for users when multiple tag-clouds are combine

A Maut aprroach for reusing domain ontologies on the basis of the NeOn Methodlogy

Knowledge resource reuse has become a popular approach within the ontology engineering field, mainly because it can speed up the ontology development process, saving time and money and promoting the application of good practices. The NeOn Methodology provides guidelines for reuse. These guidelines include the selection of the most appropriate knowledge resources for reuse in ontology development. This is a complex decision-making problem where different conflicting objectives, like the reuse cost, understandability, integration workload and reliability, have to be taken into account simultaneously. GMAA is a PC-based decision support system based on an additive multi-attribute utility model that is intended to allay the operational difficulties involved in the Decision Analysis methodology. The paper illustrates how it can be applied to select multimedia ontologies for reuse to develop a new ontology in the multimedia domain. It also demonstrates that the sensitivity analyses provided by GMAA are useful tools for making a final recommendation

An ontology-based semantic building post-occupancy evaluation framework and its application

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonCatering to sustainable development in Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry, many building performance evaluation (BPE) schemas have been developed to support building assessment and aim to narrow down the performance gap. Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE), viewed as a sub-process of BPE, is a systematic method to obtain feedback on building performance in use. However, building evaluation is a complex and knowledge-intensive process with scattered and fragmented knowledge, it is time-consuming and error-prone to acquire explicit knowledge. Benefiting from the advantages of Semantic Web technology in knowledge conceptualization, ontology, as the core of the Semantic Web, has been widely taken as an effective method for knowledge management, information representation and extraction, and logical inference in the AEC industry, especially in the BPE field. However, most of the existing ontologies in the AEC industry are lightweight ontologies that mainly focus on building a structured system to represent the specific domain knowledge or information, without developing formal axioms and constraints to provide higher expressivity. Moreover, the research focus of ontology in building assessment is mainly on energy-related fields, and there is not a comprehensive POE ontology yet, especially with the focus on building occupant satisfaction, which is the starting point of this research. This research develops an ontology-based post-occupancy evaluation framework dedicated to building performance assessment, with the ultimate aim of optimizing building operation and improving building occupants' use experience quality and well-being. In the developed framework, a heavyweight ontology is developed to structure the fragmented building performance assessment knowledge in the POE domain. In POE ontology, the building occupants' needs for building performance are generalized and classified, and the corresponded building performance assessment knowledge is formalized. In addition, a set of SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) rules and SQWRL (Semantic Query-Enhanced Web Rule Language) query rules are developed based on the benchmarking evaluation axioms to enable automatic rule-based reasoning and query in different identified application scenarios. This ontology model enables effective POE-related knowledge retrieving and sharing, and promotes its implementation in the POE domain. To validate the developed framework, a case study is carried out facilitated by the Building Use Studies (BUS) Methodology to illustrate its feasibility and effectiveness in different application scenarios. This research concludes that the proposed ontology-based POE framework has the capability to conduct a multi-objective and multi-criteria POE assessment at the building operation stage and provide a multi-criteria optimised solution

Research Objects: Towards Exchange and Reuse of Digital Knowledge

What will researchers be publishing in the future? Whilst there is little question that the Web will be the publication platform, as scholars move away from paper towards digital content, there is a need for mechanisms that support the production of self-contained units of knowledge and facilitate the publication, sharing and reuse of such entities.

 In this paper we discuss the notion of _research objects_, semantically rich aggregations of resources, that can possess some scientific intent or support some research objective. We present a number of principles that we expect such objects and their associated services to follow