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

Smart Agriculture Development and Its Contribution to the Sustainable Digital Transformation of the Agri-Food Sector

This study analyses the importance of the connection between the development of smart agriculture and sustainable digital transformation (DT) of the agri-food sector. The sustainability of DT depends on a number of complex components, especially information and communication technologies (ICT), and economic systems. The increase in the number of studies in this area indicates a complex nature as well as interdependencies. Over the last few decades of innovation, ICT, artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) have significantly affected human activities in all aspects. This includes the rapidly changing and difficult-to-predict agricultural sector in the context of global development, indicating the need to address these challenges. The global trend of DT has included all sectors, opening space for the contribution of smart agriculture to sustainable DT, but also to find appropriate "tailor-made solutions" for every challenge we face

Iot-enabled smart cities: evolution and outlook

For the last decade the Smart City concept has been under development, fostered by the growing urbanization of the world’s population and the need to handle the challenges that such a scenario raises. During this time many Smart City projects have been executed–some as proof-of-concept, but a growing number resulting in permanent, production-level deployments, improving the operation of the city and the quality of life of its citizens. Thus, Smart Cities are still a highly relevant paradigm which needs further development before it reaches its full potential and provides robust and resilient solutions. In this paper, the focus is set on the Internet of Things (IoT) as an enabling technology for the Smart City. In this sense, the paper reviews the current landscape of IoT-enabled Smart Cities, surveying relevant experiences and city initiatives that have embedded IoT within their city services and how they have generated an impact. The paper discusses the key technologies that have been developed and how they are contributing to the realization of the Smart City. Moreover, it presents some challenges that remain open ahead of us and which are the initiatives and technologies that are under development to tackle them.This research was partially funded by Spain State Research Agency (AEI) by means of the project FIERCE: Future Internet Enabled Resilient CitiEs (RTI2018-093475-A-I00). Prof. Song was supported by Smart City R&D project of the Korea Agency for Infrastructure Technology Advancement (KAIA) grant funded by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT), Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) (Grant 18NSPS-B149386-01)

Building the Semantic Web of Things Through a Dynamic Ontology

The Web of Things (WoT) recently appeared as the latest evolution of the Internet of Things and, as the name suggests, requires that devices interoperate through the Internet using Web protocols and standards. Currently, only a few theoretical approaches have been presented by researchers and industry, to fight the fragmentation of the IoT world through the adoption of semantics. This further evolution is known as Semantic WoT and relies on a WoT implementation crafted on the technologies proposed by the Semantic Web stack. This article presents a working implementation of the WoT declined in its Semantic flavor through the adoption of a shared ontology for describing devices. In addition to that, the ontology includes patterns for dynamic interactions between devices, and therefore we define it as dynamic ontology. A practical example will give a proof of concept and overall evaluation, showing how the dynamic setup proposed can foster interoperability at information level allowing on the one hand smart discovery, enabling on the other hand orchestration and automatic interaction through the semantic information available

Microservices-based IoT Applications Scheduling in Edge and Fog Computing: A Taxonomy and Future Directions

Edge and Fog computing paradigms utilise distributed, heterogeneous and resource-constrained devices at the edge of the network for efficient deployment of latency-critical and bandwidth-hungry IoT application services. Moreover, MicroService Architecture (MSA) is increasingly adopted to keep up with the rapid development and deployment needs of the fast-evolving IoT applications. Due to the fine-grained modularity of the microservices along with their independently deployable and scalable nature, MSA exhibits great potential in harnessing both Fog and Cloud resources to meet diverse QoS requirements of the IoT application services, thus giving rise to novel paradigms like Osmotic computing. However, efficient and scalable scheduling algorithms are required to utilise the said characteristics of the MSA while overcoming novel challenges introduced by the architecture. To this end, we present a comprehensive taxonomy of recent literature on microservices-based IoT applications scheduling in Edge and Fog computing environments. Furthermore, we organise multiple taxonomies to capture the main aspects of the scheduling problem, analyse and classify related works, identify research gaps within each category, and discuss future research directions.Comment: 35 pages, 10 figures, submitted to ACM Computing Survey

Interoperability Benefits and Challenges in Smart City Services: Blockchain as a Solution

The widespread usage of smart devices with various city-centric services speeds up and improves civic life, in contrast to growing privacy and security concerns. Security issues are exacerbated when e-government service providers trade their services within a centralised framework. Due to security concerns, city-centric centralised services are being converted to blockchain-based systems, which is a very time-consuming and challenging process. The interoperability of these blockchain-based systems is also more challenging due to protocol variances, an excessive amount of local transactions that raise scalability and rapidly occupy memory. In this paper, we have proposed a framework for interoperability across various blockchain-based smart city services. It also summarises how independent service providers might continue self-service choices (i.e., local transactions) without overloading the blockchain network and other organisations. A simulated interoperability network is used to show the network’s effectiveness. The experimental outcomes show the scalability and memory optimization of the blockchain network

Examining citizens' perceived value of internet of things technologies in facilitating public sector services engagement

YesWith the advancement of disruptive new technologies, there has been a considerable focus on personalisation as an important component in nurturing users' engagement. In the context of smart cities, Internet of Things (IoT) offer a unique opportunity to help empower citizens and improve societies' engagement with their governments at both micro and macro levels. This study aims to examine the role of perceived value of IoT in improving citizens' engagement with public services. A survey of 313 citizens in the UK, engaging in various public services, enabled through IoT, found that the perceived value of IoT is strongly influenced by empowerment, perceived usefulness and privacy related issues resulting in significantly affecting their continuous use intentions. The study offers valuable insights into the importance of perceived value of IoT-enabled services, while at the same time, providing an intersectional perspective of UK citizens towards the use of disruptive new technologies in the public sector