A semantic IoT framework to support RESTful devices' API interoperability

Abstract

With the diffusion of sensors and smart devices, and the advances in connection technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) has become a very popular topic. Because of the creation and expansion of new and existing sensor networks, the need to define a common standard for sensors' interfaces representation has arisen. Currently it is difficult to make different sensors and sensors' networks interoperate seamlessly, since their interfaces are not always well specified or are not ready to be adapted immediately to one another. In order to overcome the current lack of a shared standard, in this paper we propose an IoT framework which, by analysing sensors' APIs RESTful descriptions and the interfaces exposed by smart-sensors, tries to integrate different sensors' interfaces into a common Aggregator. Such an Aggregator relies on wrappers and adapters, either automatically built or provided by experts, to make programming and using sensors from different providers completely opaque to the users, who only sees a set of general and abstract functions available. Semantic technologies and matching algorithms are used to support the creation of such wrappers and to easily discover and categorize new sensor types.