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

A Survey on the Web of Things

The Web of Things (WoT) paradigm was proposed first in the late 2000s, with the idea of leveraging Web standards to interconnect all types of embedded devices. More than ten years later, the fragmentation of the IoT landscape has dramatically increased as a consequence of the exponential growth of connected devices, making interoperability one of the key issues for most IoT deployments. Contextually, many studies have demonstrated the applicability of Web technologies on IoT scenarios, while the joint efforts from the academia and the industry have led to the proposals of standard specifications for developing WoT systems. Through a systematic review of the literature, we provide a detailed illustration of the WoT paradigm for both researchers and newcomers, by reconstructing the temporal evolution of key concepts and the historical trends, providing an in-depth taxonomy of software architectures and enabling technologies of WoT deployments and, finally, discussing the maturity of WoT vertical markets. Moreover, we identify some future research directions that may open the way to further innovation on WoT systems

Sensor Search Techniques for Sensing as a Service Architecture for The Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is part of the Internet of the future and will comprise billions of intelligent communicating "things" or Internet Connected Objects (ICO) which will have sensing, actuating, and data processing capabilities. Each ICO will have one or more embedded sensors that will capture potentially enormous amounts of data. The sensors and related data streams can be clustered physically or virtually, which raises the challenge of searching and selecting the right sensors for a query in an efficient and effective way. This paper proposes a context-aware sensor search, selection and ranking model, called CASSARAM, to address the challenge of efficiently selecting a subset of relevant sensors out of a large set of sensors with similar functionality and capabilities. CASSARAM takes into account user preferences and considers a broad range of sensor characteristics, such as reliability, accuracy, location, battery life, and many more. The paper highlights the importance of sensor search, selection and ranking for the IoT, identifies important characteristics of both sensors and data capture processes, and discusses how semantic and quantitative reasoning can be combined together. This work also addresses challenges such as efficient distributed sensor search and relational-expression based filtering. CASSARAM testing and performance evaluation results are presented and discussed.Comment: IEEE sensors Journal, 2013. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1303.244

IETF standardization in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT): a survey

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there have been many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, followed by an extensive overview of IETF standardization work in the 6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is complemented with a broad overview of related research results that illustrate how this work can be extended or used to tackle other problems and with a discussion on open issues and challenges. As such the aim of this paper is twofold: apart from giving readers solid insights in IETF standardization work on the Internet of Things, it also aims to encourage readers to further explore the world of Internet-connected objects, pointing to future research opportunities

Enabling the web of things: facilitating deployment, discovery and resource access to IoT objects using embedded web services

Today, the IETF Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is being standardised. CoAP takes the internet of things to the next level: it enables the implementation of RESTful web services on embedded devices, thus enabling the construction of an easily accessible web of things. However, before tiny objects can make themselves available through embedded web services, several manual configuration steps are still needed to integrate a sensor network within an existing networking environment. In this paper, we describe a novel self-organisation solution to facilitate the deployment of constrained networks and enable the discovery, end-to-end connectivity and service usage of these newly deployed sensor nodes. By using embedded web service technology, the need of other protocols on these resource constrained devices is avoided. It allows automatic hierarchical discovery of CoAP servers, resulting in a browsable hierarchy of CoAP servers, which can be accessed both over CoAP and hypertext transfer protocol

Enabling the web of things: facilitating deployment, discovery and resource access to IoT objects using embedded web services

Today, the IETF Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) is being standardised. CoAP takes the internet of things to the next level: it enables the implementation of RESTful web services on embedded devices, thus enabling the construction of an easily accessible web of things. However, before tiny objects can make themselves available through embedded web services, several manual configuration steps are still needed to integrate a sensor network within an existing networking environment. In this paper, we describe a novel self-organisation solution to facilitate the deployment of constrained networks and enable the discovery, end-to-end connectivity and service usage of these newly deployed sensor nodes. By using embedded web service technology, the need of other protocols on these resource constrained devices is avoided. It allows automatic hierarchical discovery of CoAP servers, resulting in a browsable hierarchy of CoAP servers, which can be accessed both over CoAP and hypertext transfer protocol.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 258885 (SPITFIRE project), from the iMinds ICON project O’CareCloudS, from a VLIR PhD grant to Isam Ishaq and through an FWO pos tdoc research grant for Eli De Poorter

Toward interoperability in a web of things

In this position paper we explore the challenges and issues around interoperability in the web of things. A key concern is how to increase interoperability while maintaining a high degree of innovation and exploration in the community. To that end we propose a hub- centric approach toward interoperability consisting of four levels or stages. We are working to validate this approach in the context of a large-scale IoT ecosystem project consisting of eight IoT hubs in different domains where a key requirement is hub-to-hub and hub- application interoperability

The Penetration of Internet of Things in Robotics: Towards a Web of Robotic Things

As the Internet of Things (IoT) penetrates different domains and application areas, it has recently entered also the world of robotics. Robotics constitutes a modern and fast-evolving technology, increasingly being used in industrial, commercial and domestic settings. IoT, together with the Web of Things (WoT) could provide many benefits to robotic systems. Some of the benefits of IoT in robotics have been discussed in related work. This paper moves one step further, studying the actual current use of IoT in robotics, through various real-world examples encountered through a bibliographic research. The paper also examines the potential ofWoT, together with robotic systems, investigating which concepts, characteristics, architectures, hardware, software and communication methods of IoT are used in existing robotic systems, which sensors and actions are incorporated in IoT-based robots, as well as in which application areas. Finally, the current application of WoT in robotics is examined and discussed

The Interoperability of Things: Interoperable solutions as an enabler for IoT and Web 3.0

This paper presents an overview of the interoperability concepts along with the challenges for the IoT domain and the upcoming Web 3.0. We identify four levels of interoperability and the relevant solutions for accomplishing vertical and horizontal compatibility between the various layers of a modern IoT ecosystem, referred to as: technological, syntactic, semantic, and organizational interoperability. The goal is to achieve cross-domain interaction and facilitate the proper usage and management of the provided IoT services and applications. An interoperability framework is also proposed where the involved system components can cooperate and offer the seamless operation from the device to the backend framework. This by-design end-to-end interoperation enables the interplay of several complex service composition settings and the management of the system via patterns. The overall proposal is adopted by the EU funded project SEMIoTICS as an enabler towards the IoT and Web 3.0, even when products from different vendors are utilized