A data model for enabling deep learning practices on discovery services of cyber-physical systems

Abstract

The W3C Web of Things (WoT) is a leading technology that facilitates dynamic information management in the Internet of Things (IoT). In most IoT scenarios, devices and their associated information change continuously, generating a large amount of data. Hence, to correctly use the information and the data generated by different devices, a new perspective of managing and ensuring data quality is recommended. Applying Data Science techniques to create the data model can help to manage and ensure data quality by creating a common schema that can be reused in future projects, as well as producing recommendations to facilitate Service Discovery. In addition, due to the dynamic devices that change over time or under specific circumstances, the data model created must be sufficiently abstract to add new instances and to support new requirements that devices should incorporate. The use of models helps to raise the abstraction level, adapting it to the continuous changes of devices by defining instances associated with the data model. This paper proposes two data models: one for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) to define device information fetched by a Discovery Service, and another for applying Deep Learning in natural language problems through a Transformer approach. The latter matches user queries in natural language sentences with WoT devices or services. These data models expand the Thing Description model to help find similar CPSs by giving a confidence level to each CPS based on features such as security and the number of times the device was accessed. The results show how the proposed models support the search process of CPSs in syntactic and natural language searches. Furthermore, the four levels of the FAIR principles are validated for the proposed data models, thus ensuring the data's transparency, reproducibility, and reusability.