Ontologies for the internet of things

Abstract

Challenges the Internet of Things (IoT) is facing are directly inherited from today's Internet. However, they are amplified by the anticipated large scale deployments of devices and services, information flow and direct user involvment in the IoT. Challenges are many and we focus on addressing those related to scalability, heterogeneity of IoT components, and the highly dynamic and unknown nature of the network topology. In this paper, we give an overview of a service-oriented middleware solution that addresses those challenges using semantic technologies to provide interoperability and flexibility. We especially focus on modeling a set of ontologies that describe devices and their functionalities and thoroughly model the domain of physics. The physics domain is indeed at the core of the IoT, as it allows the approximation and estimation of functionalities usually provided by things. Those functionalities will be deployed as services on appropriate devices through our middleware.