Making heterogeneous smart home data interoperable with the SAREF ontology

SAREF is an ontology created to enable interoperability between smart devices, but there is a lack in the literature of practical examples to implement SAREF in real applications. We validate the practical implementation of SAREF through two approaches. We first examine two methods to map the IoT data available in a smart home into linked data using SAREF: (1) by creating a template-based mapping to describe how SAREF can be used and (2) by using a mapping language to demonstrate it can be simple to map, while still using SAREF. The second approach demonstrates the communication capabilities of IoT devices when they share knowledge represented using SAREF and describes how SAREF enables interoperability between different devices. The two approaches demonstrate that all the information from various data sets of smart devices can successfully be transformed into the SAREF ontology and how SAREF can be applied in a concrete interoperability framework

Validating SAREF in a Smart Home Environment

SAREF is an ontology created to enable interoperability between smart devices. While the IoT community has shown interest and understanding of SAREF as a means for interoperability, there is a lack in the literature of practical examples to implement SAREF in real applications. In order to validate the practical implementation of SAREF we perform two experiments. First we map IoT data available in a smart home into RDF using SAREF. In the second part of the paper an IoT environment is created by using the Knowledge Engine, a framework created to allow communication between smart devices, operating on Raspberry Pi’s emulating IoT devices, where the communication of the IoT devices is performed by sharing knowledge represented with SAREF. These experiments demonstrate that SAREF is an ontology that is successfully applicable in different situations, with data-mapping showing that SAREF is able to represent the information of different smart devices and by using the Knowledge Engine showing that SAREF can enable interoperability between smart devices