A Lightweight Mobile Service for Context Representation through an IoT-oriented Ontology

Abstract

Internet of Things is a paradigm in which sensors, actuators, devices or things seamlessly interact with each other to achieve common goals. Such interaction is reachable if an expressive, interoperable and lightweight representation of context information exists. The literature has recommended ontologies as the main formalism for context information representation, but depending on the ontology being used it can be complex and heavy to run on resource-constrained devices. This paper presents a mobile service which represents context information using the emergent IoT-Lite ontology. An experiment with such service is performed in terms of time behavior and memory utilization when representing an increasing amount of data. Results demonstrate our service is lightweight if considered the amounts of time and memory spent for representing ontology-based data even in a resource-constrained device.