Opportunistic Reasoning for the Semantic Web: Adapting Reasoning to the Environment

Despite the efforts devoted so far, the Semantic Web vision appears to be an eluding target. We propose a paradigm shift for the Semantic Web centred around the pragmatics of developing Semantic Web applications in order to overcome the bootstrapping problem it suffers from. This paradigm is based on the vision of the Semantic Web as the result emerging from the integration and collaboration of a plethora of Semantic Web applications, rather that as a global entity. On the basis of this assumption we describe and propose Opportunistic Reasoning as a general purpose reasoning model suitable for the development of reasonably scalable Semantic Web applications

CEIoT: A Framework for Interlinking Smart Things in the Internet of Things

In the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) environment, things are interconnected but not interlinked. Interlinking relevant things offers great opportunities to discover implicit relationships and enable potential interactions among things. To achieve this goal, implicit correlations between things need to be discovered. However, little work has been done on this important direction and the lack of correlation discovery has inevitably limited the power of interlinking things in IoT. With the rapidly growing number of things that are connected to the Internet, there are increasing needs for correlations formation and discovery so as to support interlinking relevant things together effectively. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) architecture to extract correlations between smart things. Our MAS system is able to identify correlations on demand due to the autonomous behaviors of object agents. Specifically, we introduce a novel open-sourced framework, namely CEIoT, to extract correlations in the context of IoT. Based on the attributes of things our IoT dataset, we identify three types of correlations in our system and propose a new approach to extract and represent the correlations between things. We implement our architecture using Java Agent Development Framework (JADE) and conduct experimental studies on both synthetic and real-world datasets. The results demonstrate that our approach can extract the correlations at a much higher speed than the naive pairwise computation method

Design of semantic information broker for localized computing environments in the internet of things

Emerging communication technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT) make all the devices of a spatial-limited physical computing environment locally interconnected as well as connected to the Internet. Software agents running on devices make the latter “smart objects” that are visible in our daily lives as real participating entities. Based on the M3 architecture for smart spaces, we consider the problem of creating a smart space deploying a Semantic Information Broker (SIB) in a localized IoT-environment. SIB supports agent interaction in the smart space via sharing and self-generating information and its semantics. This paper proposes a renewed SIB design with increased extensibility, dependability, and portability. The research done is a step towards an efficient open interoperability platform for the smart space application development

ENABLING COLLABORATIVE E-HEALTH THROUGH TRIPLESPACE COMPUTING

Abstract The design and promotion of electronic patient summaries as an instrument to facilitate the pervasive delivery of healthcare is emerging as a key technology in eHealth solutions. From the technical point of view this requires powerful middleware systems supporting interoperability, multi-lingualism, security and patient privacy. In this paper we present a semantic coordination model and describe how it can be used to support pervasive access to electronic patient summaries

Security in Internet of Things: networked smart objects.

Internet of Things (IoT) is an innovative paradigm approaching both industries and humans every-day life. It refers to the networked interconnection of every-day objects, which are equipped with ubiquitous intelligence. It not only aims at increasing the ubiquity of the Internet, but also at leading towards a highly distributed network of devices communicating with human beings as well as with other devices. Thanks to rapid advances in underlying technologies, IoT is opening valuable opportunities for a large number of novel applications, that promise to improve the quality of humans lives, facilitating the exchange of services. In this scenario, security represents a crucial aspect to be addressed, due to the high level of heterogeneity of the involved devices and to the sensibility of the managed information. Moreover, a system architecture should be established, before the IoT is fully operable in an efficient, scalable and interoperable manner. The main goal of this PhD thesis concerns the design and the implementation of a secure and distributed middleware platform tailored to IoT application domains. The effectiveness of the proposed solution is evaluated by means of a prototype and real case studies

EXPRESS: Resource-oriented and RESTful Semantic Web services

This thesis investigates an approach that simplifies the development of Semantic Web services (SWS) by removing the need for additional semantic descriptions.The most actively researched approaches to Semantic Web services introduce explicit semantic descriptions of services that are in addition to the existing semantic descriptions of the service domains. This increases their complexity and design overhead. The need for semantically describing the services in such approaches stems from their foundations in service-oriented computing, i.e. the extension of already existing service descriptions. This thesis demonstrates that adopting a resource-oriented approach based on REST will, in contrast to service-oriented approaches, eliminate the need for explicit semantic service descriptions and service vocabularies. This reduces the development efforts while retaining the significant functional capabilities.The approach proposed in this thesis, called EXPRESS (Expressing RESTful Semantic Services), utilises the similarities between REST and the Semantic Web, such as resource realisation, self-describing representations, and uniform interfaces. The semantics of a service is elicited from a resource’s semantic description in the domain ontology and the semantics of the uniform interface, hence eliminating the need for additional semantic descriptions. Moreover, stub-generation is a by-product of the mapping between entities in the domain ontology and resources.EXPRESS was developed to test the feasibility of eliminating explicit service descriptions and service vocabularies or ontologies, to explore the restrictions placed on domain ontologies as a result, to investigate the impact on the semantic quality of the description, and explore the benefits and costs to developers. To achieve this, an online demonstrator that allows users to generate stubs has been developed. In addition, a matchmaking experiment was conducted to show that the descriptions of the services are comparable to OWL-S in terms of their ability to be discovered, while improving the efficiency of discovery. Finally, an expert review was undertaken which provided evidence of EXPRESS’s simplicity and practicality when developing SWS from scratch