Semantic IoT Solutions - A Developer Perspective

Semantic technologies have recently gained significant support in a number of communities, in particular the IoT community. An important problem to be solved is that, on the one hand, it is clear that the value of IoT increases significantly with the availability of information from a wide variety of domains. On the other hand, existing solutions target specific applications or application domains and there is no easy way of sharing information between the resulting silos. Thus, a solution is needed to enable interoperability across information silos. As there is a huge heterogeneity regarding IoT technologies on the lower levels, the semantic level is seen as a promising approach for achieving interoperability (i.e. semantic interoperability) to unify IoT device description, data, bring common interaction, data exploration, etc.This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements No.732240 (SynchroniCity) and No. 688467 (VICINITY); from ETSI under Specialist Task Forces 534, 556, 566 and 578. This work is partially funded by Hazards SEES NSF Award EAR 1520870, and KHealth NIH 1 R01 HD087132-01

RDF Presentation and Correct Content Conveyance for Legacy Services and the Web of Things

International audienceRDF aims at being the universal abstract data model for structured data on the Web. However, the vast majority of web services consume and expose non-RDF data, and it is unlikely that all these services be converted to RDF one day. This is especially true for sensors and other devices in the Web of Things, as most RDF formats are verbose while constrained devices prefer to consume and expose data in concise formats. In this paper, we propose an approach to make these services and things reach semantic interoperability, while letting them the freedom to use their preferred formats. Our approach is rooted in the Web's architectural principles and the linked data principles, and relies on the definition of RDF presentations, which describe the link between RDF graphs and their representations. We introduce the RDF Presentation ontology (RDFP) that can be used to model inputs and outputs of procedures of the new Semantic Sensor Network ontology (SOSA/SSN), and inputData and outputData of interaction patterns of things in the W3C WoT Thing Description ontology. We then propose practical solutions for web agents to be able to discover how a message content can be interpreted as RDF, generated from RDF, or validated, with different Web interaction protocols