Enabling Linked Data access to the Internet of Things

Abstract

The term Internet of Things refers to the vision, that all kinds of physical objects are uniquely identifiable and have a virtual representation on the Internet. We present an approach for equipping embedded and smart devices on the Internet of Things with a Linked Data interface. The approach is based on mapping existing structured data on the device to vocabularies and ontologies and exposing this information as dereferencable RDF directly from within the device. As a result, all smart devices (e.g. tablets, smartphones, TVs) can easily provide standardized structured information and become first class citizens on the Data Web. A particular specific requirement when dealing with smart and embedded devices is resource constraints. Our evaluation shows, that the overhead introduced by equipping a device with a Linked Data interface is neglectable given modern software and hardware environments.