End-to-End Semantic Interoperability Mechanisms for IoT

Semantic interoperability is the designed property where various systems can interact with each other and exchange data with unambiguous, shared meaning. This enables knowledge discovery, machine computable reasoning and federation of different information systems. Traditionally, technologies from the Semantic Web are adapted in order to capture the inherited properties of the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. Such technologies provide common description and representation of data and services; they characterize things and their capabilities, deal with the semantic annotation, resource discovery, access management, knowledge extraction in a machine-readable or interoperable manner. Thus, the common interpretation of semantic information in a globally shared ontology could be quite useful. However, several local systems may utilize popular or standardized ontologies, eventually they extend them and establish their own semantics and interfaces. As a result, the direct interaction between these systems is not feasible. With this in mind, our goal is to propose the use of semantic interoperability mechanisms, which correlates the required information and enables the interoperability of systems with different semantics or cross-domain interaction. A motivating example of smart sensing is analyzed along with the implementation of the proposed approach.