Semantic Mediation in Smart Water Networks

Water Distribution Networks (WDN) are the infrastructures responsible for delivering drinking water to consumers. The effective monitoring and control of these systems is of vital importance since malfunction may significantly affect the health, safety, security and/or economic well-being of people. The advancements in coupling WDN with the ICT infrastructure, combined with the more recent introduction of smart sensing and actuation technologies, have enabled the enhancement of "Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA)"-based applications. These applications in current water systems assume pre-defined configuration and characteristics of the involved components (sensors, actuators, controllers, etc.). This work explores how semantic mediation techniques may contribute to the online configuration of the monitoring and control architectures by exploiting and reasoning over the capabilities of deployed devices

Trust and Privacy Solutions Based on Holistic Service Requirements

The products and services designed for Smart Cities provide the necessary tools to improve the management of modern cities in a more efficient way. These tools need to gather citizens’ information about their activity, preferences, habits, etc. opening up the possibility of tracking them. Thus, privacy and security policies must be developed in order to satisfy and manage the legislative heterogeneity surrounding the services provided and comply with the laws of the country where they are provided. This paper presents one of the possible solutions to manage this heterogeneity, bearing in mind these types of networks, such as Wireless Sensor Networks, have important resource limitations. A knowledge and ontology management system is proposed to facilitate the collaboration between the business, legal and technological areas. This will ease the implementation of adequate specific security and privacy policies for a given service. All these security and privacy policies are based on the information provided by the deployed platforms and by expert system processing

Discovery and Push Notification Mechanisms for Mobile Cloud Services

Viimase viie aasta jooksul on mobiilsed seadmed nagu sülearvutid, pihuarvutid, nutitelefonid jmt. tunginud peaaegu kõigisse inimeste igapäevaelu tegevustesse. Samuti on põhjalik teadus- ja arendustegevus mobiilsete tehnoloogiate vallas viinud märkimisväärsete täiustusteni riistvara, tarkvara ja andmeedastuse alal. Tänapäeval on mobiilsed seadmed varustatud sisseehitatud sensorite, kaamera, puutetundliku ekraani, suurema hulga mäluga, kuid ka tõhusamate energiatarbemehhanismidega. Lisaks on iOS ja Android operatsioonisüsteemide väljalaske tõttu suurenenud nii mobiilirakenduste arv kui keerukus, pakkudes arvukamalt kõrgetasemelisi rakendusi. Sarnaselt on toimunud olulised arengud ja standardiseerimisele suunatud jõupingutused veebiteenusete valdkonnas ja elementaarsetele veebiteenuste ligipääsu kasutatakse laialdaselt nutitelefonidest. See on viinud loogilise järgmise sammuna veebiteenuste pakkumiseni nutitelefonidest. Telefonidest veebiteenuste pakkumise kontseptsioon ei ole uus ning seda on põhjalikult uurinud Srirama, kes pakkus välja Mobile Host (Mobiilne Veebiteenuse Pakkuja) kontseptsiooni. Algne realisatsioon kasutas aga aegunud tehnoloogiaid nagu JMEE, PersonalJava, SOAP arhitektuur jne. See töö uuendab Mobile Host'i kasutades uusimaid tehnoloogiad, nagu Android OS ja REST arhitektuur, ning pakub välja teenusemootori, mis põhineb Apache Felix'il - OSGi platvormi realisatsioonil piiratud ressurssidega seadmetele. Hämmastava kiirusega toimunud arengud mobiilsete arvutuste vallas võimaldavad uue põlvkonna veebirakenduste loomist valdkondades nagu keskkonnateadlikkus, sotsiaalvõrgustikud, koostöövahendid, asukohapõhised teenused jne. Sellised rakendused saavad ära kasutada Mobile Host'i võimalusi. Selle tulemusena on klientidel ligipääs väga suurele hulgale teenustele, mistõttu tekib vajadus efektiivse teenuste avastamise mehhanismi järele. See töö pakub välja kataloogipõhise avastusmehhanismi võrgu ülekatte toega suurtele, kõrge liikuvusega võrgustikele. See mehhanism toetub OWL-S'le, mis on ontoloogia veebiteenuseid pakkuvate ressursside avastamiseks, väljakutseks, koostamiseks ja jälgimiseks. Töö kirjeldab ka Srirama välja pakutud algupärast teenuste avastamise mehhanismi, mis toetub peer-to-peer võrkudele ja Apache Lucene võtmesõna otsingumootorile. Uurimuse käigus uuendatakse teenuseotsing kasutama Apache Solr'i, Apache Lucene'i viimast versiooni. Teenuste avastust testiti põhjalikult ja tulemused on töös kokkuvõtvalt välja toodud. Mobiilsete tehnoloogiate vallas uuritakse ka võimalust kasutada pilvetehnolologiat laiendamaks mobiilseadmete salvestusmahtu ja töökoormust edastades pilve andme- ja arvutusmahukad ülesanded. See soodustab keerulisemate ja võimalusrohkemate mobiilirakenduste arendust. Pilve delegeeritavate toimingute aeganõudva iseloomu tõttu aga on vajalik asünkroonne mehhanism teavitamaks kasutajat, millal töömahukad tegevused on lõpetatud. Mobiilsete pilveteenuste pakkujad ja vahevara lahendused võivad kasu saada Mobile Host'ist ja selle asünkroonsete teavituste võimekusest. Uurimus esitleb nelja teavitusmehhanismi: AC2DM, APNS, IBM MQTT ja Mobile Host'i põhine teavitus. Töö võtab kokku kvantitatiivse analüüsi tulemused ja toob välja nelja teavitamise lähenemise tugevused ja nõrkused. Lisaks kirjeldatakse CroudSTag rakenduse realisatsiooni - CroudSTag on mobiilirakendus, mille eesmärgiks on sotsiaalsete gruppide moodustamine kasutades näotuvastustehnoloogiat. CroudSTag-i realisatsioon kasutab mobiilseid pilveteenuseid ja Mobile Host'i, et pakkuda oma funktsionaalsust kasutajale.In the last lustrum the mobile devices such as laptops, PDAs, smart phones, tablets, etc. have pervaded almost all the environments where people perform their day-to-day activities. Further, the extensive Research and Development in mobile technologies has led to significant improvements in hardware, software and transmission. Similarly, there are significant developments and standardization efforts in web services domain and basic web services have been widely accessed from smart phones. This has lead to the logical next step of providing web services from the smart phones. The concept of the web service provisioning from smart phones is not new and has been extensively explored by Srirama who proposed the concept of Mobile Host. However, the original implementation considered aged technologies such as JMEE, PersonalJava, SOAP architecture among others. This work updates the Mobile Host to the latest technologies like Android OS and REST architecture and proposes a service engine based on Apache Felix, and OSGI implementation for resource constraint devices. Moreover, the astonishing speed in developments in mobile computing enable the new generation of applications from domains such as context-awareness, social network, collaborative tools, location based services, etc., which benefit from the Mobile Host service provisioning capabilities. As a result the clients have access to a huge number of services available; therefore, an efficient and effective service discovery mechanism is required. The thesis proposes a directory-based with network overlay support discovery mechanism for large networks with high mobility. The proposed discovery mechanism relies in OWL-S, an ontology for service discovery, invocation, composition, and monitoring of web resources. The work also considers the original service discovery mechanism proposed by Srirama relying in peer-to-peer networks and Apache Lucene, a keyword search engine. The study updates the service search to Apache Solr, the latest development for Apache Lucene. The service discovery was extensively tested and the results are summarized in this work. Mobile technologies are looking into the clouds for extending their capabilities in storage and processing by offloading data and process intensive tasks. This fosters the development of more complex and rich mobile applications. However, due to the time-consuming nature of the tasks delegated to the clouds, an asynchronous mechanism is necessary for notifying the user when the intensive tasks are completed. Mobile cloud service providers and Middleware solutions might benefit from Mobile Host and its asynchronous notification capabilities. The study presents four push notification mechanisms being AC2DM, APNS, IBM MQTT and Mobile Host based push notification. The work summarizes the results of a quantitative analysis and highlights the strengths and weakness of the four notifications approaches. In addition, it explains CroudSTag realization, a mobile application that aims the social group formation by means of facial recognition that relies in mobile cloud services and Mobile Host to provide its functionality to the user

Semantically-Enabled Sensor Plug & Play for the Sensor Web

Environmental sensors have continuously improved by becoming smaller, cheaper, and more intelligent over the past years. As consequence of these technological advancements, sensors are increasingly deployed to monitor our environment. The large variety of available sensor types with often incompatible protocols complicates the integration of sensors into observing systems. The standardized Web service interfaces and data encodings defined within OGC’s Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) framework make sensors available over the Web and hide the heterogeneous sensor protocols from applications. So far, the SWE framework does not describe how to integrate sensors on-the-fly with minimal human intervention. The driver software which enables access to sensors has to be implemented and the measured sensor data has to be manually mapped to the SWE models. In this article we introduce a Sensor Plug & Play infrastructure for the Sensor Web by combining (1) semantic matchmaking functionality, (2) a publish/subscribe mechanism underlying the SensorWeb, as well as (3) a model for the declarative description of sensor interfaces which serves as a generic driver mechanism. We implement and evaluate our approach by applying it to an oil spill scenario. The matchmaking is realized using existing ontologies and reasoning engines and provides a strong case for the semantic integration capabilities provided by Semantic Web research

A service-oriented middleware for integrated management of crowdsourced and sensor data streams in disaster management

The increasing number of sensors used in diverse applications has provided a massive number of continuous, unbounded, rapid data and requires the management of distinct protocols, interfaces and intermittent connections. As traditional sensor networks are error-prone and difficult to maintain, the study highlights the emerging role of “citizens as sensors” as a complementary data source to increase public awareness. To this end, an interoperable, reusable middleware for managing spatial, temporal, and thematic data using Sensor Web Enablement initiative services and a processing engine was designed, implemented, and deployed. The study found that its approach provided effective sensor data-stream access, publication, and filtering in dynamic scenarios such as disaster management, as well as it enables batch and stream management integration. Also, an interoperability analytics testing of a flood citizen observatory highlighted even variable data such as those provided by the crowd can be integrated with sensor data stream. Our approach, thus, offers a mean to improve near-real-time applications

A dynamic and context-aware semantic mediation service for discovering and fusion of heterogeneous sensor data

Sensors play an increasingly critical role in capturing and distributing observations of phenomena in our environment. The vision of the semantic sensor web is to enable the interoperability of various applications that use sensor data provided by semantically heterogeneous sensor services. However, several challenges still need to be addressed to achieve this vision. More particularly, mechanisms that can support context-aware semantic mapping and that can adapt to the dynamic metadata of sensors are required. Semantic mapping for the sensor web is required to support sensor data fusion, sensor data discovery and retrieval, and automatic semantic annotation, to name only a few tasks. This paper presents a context-aware ontology-based semantic mediation service for heterogeneous sensor services. The semantic mediation service is context-aware and dynamic because it takes into account the real-time variability of thematic, spatial, and temporal elements that describe sensor data in different contexts. The semantic mediation service integrates rule-based reasoning to support the resolution of semantic heterogeneities. An application scenario is presented showing how the semantic mediation service can improve sensor data interpretation, reuse, and sharing in static and dynamic settings

Smart Environmental Data Infrastructures: Bridging the Gap between Earth Sciences and Citizens

The monitoring and forecasting of environmental conditions is a task to which much effort and resources are devoted by the scientific community and relevant authorities. Representative examples arise in meteorology, oceanography, and environmental engineering. As a consequence, high volumes of data are generated, which include data generated by earth observation systems and different kinds of models. Specific data models, formats, vocabularies and data access infrastructures have been developed and are currently being used by the scientific community. Due to this, discovering, accessing and analyzing environmental datasets requires very specific skills, which is an important barrier for their reuse in many other application domains. This paper reviews earth science data representation and access standards and technologies, and identifies the main challenges to overcome in order to enable their integration in semantic open data infrastructures. This would allow non-scientific information technology practitioners to devise new end-user solutions for citizen problems in new application domainsThis research was co-funded by (i) the TRAFAIR project (2017-EU-IA-0167), co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility of the European Union, (ii) the RADAR-ON-RAIA project (0461_RADAR_ON_RAIA_1_E) co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the Iterreg V-A Spain-Portugal program (POCTEP) 2014-2020, and (iii) the Consellería de Educación, Universidade e Formación Profesional of the regional government of Galicia (Spain), through the support for research groups with growth potential (ED431B 2018/28)S

Spatial integration of Semantic Web Services: the e-Merges approach

As Semantic Web Services (SWS) are becoming a more mature technology, the question of their integration into the web landscape is pushed to the foreground. In a world where it is believed that up to 80% of data has a geographical component, one in which new web maps applications recently show tremendous growth, and in which of course we constantly think and act in terms of movement and geographic features, integration into the spatial domain appears as an essential step toward wide-scale adoption of SWS technology. However, geographic space, as a unique but all encompassing domain has specificities that semantic descriptions must acknowledge. Furthermore, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) need to adapt to human cognitive abilities of spatial representation and reasoning. In this context, e-Merges, an emergency management application prototype developed in collaboration with emergency planners of public agencies, is an ongoing effort to integrate SWS technology in a GIS environment, by applying the SWS notions of goal and context based interaction

ACTAS: Adaptive Composition and Trading with Agents for Services

Mainly in business domains, the vision of gaining flexible, adaptive service environments is based on the standardization and practical proliferation of (Semantic) Web Services, ontologies, and agents. The standards of Web Services and their Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) became the standard paradigm for software component integration. Dynamic changes and the permanently increasing amount of available e-services of different domains are a challenge of Service Discovery and Composition. Mediation between different approaches and expert knowledge is often necessary for the composition of services of different domains. Semantic enhancements, Autonomic Service Discovery, and the research for more holistic concepts for the classification of e-services are current attempts of overcoming this challenge, in order to reach the ultimate goal of Autonomic SOC

Towards Data Sharing across Decentralized and Federated IoT Data Analytics Platforms

In the past decade the Internet-of-Things concept has overwhelmingly entered all of the fields where data are produced and processed, thus, resulting in a plethora of IoT platforms, typically cloud-based, that centralize data and services management. In this scenario, the development of IoT services in domains such as smart cities, smart industry, e-health, automotive, are possible only for the owner of the IoT deployments or for ad-hoc business one-to-one collaboration agreements. The realization of "smarter" IoT services or even services that are not viable today envisions a complete data sharing with the usage of multiple data sources from multiple parties and the interconnection with other IoT services. In this context, this work studies several aspects of data sharing focusing on Internet-of-Things. We work towards the hyperconnection of IoT services to analyze data that goes beyond the boundaries of a single IoT system. This thesis presents a data analytics platform that: i) treats data analytics processes as services and decouples their management from the data analytics development; ii) decentralizes the data management and the execution of data analytics services between fog, edge and cloud; iii) federates peers of data analytics platforms managed by multiple parties allowing the design to scale into federation of federations; iv) encompasses intelligent handling of security and data usage control across the federation of decentralized platforms instances to reduce data and service management complexity. The proposed solution is experimentally evaluated in terms of performances and validated against use cases. Further, this work adopts and extends available standards and open sources, after an analysis of their capabilities, fostering an easier acceptance of the proposed framework. We also report efforts to initiate an IoT services ecosystem among 27 cities in Europe and Korea based on a novel methodology. We believe that this thesis open a viable path towards a hyperconnection of IoT data and services, minimizing the human effort to manage it, but leaving the full control of the data and service management to the users' will