A Semantic Sensor Web Architecture in the Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) vision is connecting uniquely identifiable devices to the internet, best described through ontologies. Furthermore, new emerging technologies such as wireless sensor networks (WSN) are recognized as essential enabling component of the IoT today. Hence, the interest is to provide linked sensor data through the web either following the semantic web enablement (SWE) standard or the linked data approach. Likewise, a need exists to explore those data for potential hidden knowledge through data mining techniques utilized by a domain ontology. Following that rationale, a new lightweight IoT architecture has been developed. It supports linking sensors, other devices and people via a single web by mean of a device-person-activity (DPA) ontology. The architecture is validated by mean of three rich-in-semantic services: contextual data mining over WSN, semantic WSN web enablement, and linked WSN data. The architecture could be easily extensible to capture semantics of input sensor data from other domains as well.