Challenges and Opportunities in Applying Semantics to Improve Access Control in the Field of Internet of Things

The increased number of IoT devices results in continuously generated massive amounts of raw data. Parts of this data are private and highly sensitive as they reflect owner’s behavior, obligations, habits, and preferences. In this paper, we point out that flexible and comprehensive access control policies are “a must” in the IoT domain. The Semantic Web technologies can address many of the challenges that the IoT access control is facing with today. Therefore, we analyze the current state of the art in this area and identify the challenges and opportunities for improved access control in a semantically enriched IoT environment. Applying semantics to IoT access control opens a lot of opportunities, such as semantic inference and reasoning, easy data sharing, data trading, new approaches to authentication, security policies based on a natural language and enhances the interoperability using a common ontology

4W1H in IoT semantics

International audienceIoT systems are now being deployed worldwide to sense phenomena of interest. The existing IoT systems are often independent which limits the use of sensor data to only one application. Semantic solutions have been proposed to support reuse of sensor data across IoT systems and applications. This allows integration of IoT systems for increased productivity by solving challenges associated with their interoperability and heterogeneity. Several ontologies have been proposed to handle different aspects of sensor data collection in IoT systems, ranging from sensor discovery to applying reasoning on collected sensor data for drawing inferences. In this paper, we study and categorise the existing ontologies based on the fundamental ontological concepts (e.g., sensors, context, location, and more) required for annotating different aspects of data collection and data access in an IoT application. We identify these fundamental concepts by answering the 4Ws (What, When, Who, Where) and 1H (How) identified using the 4W1H methodology