Beyond semantic interoperability in IoT ecosystems

Interoperability is an important research stream in the Internet of Things, with semantics being the current focus of attention. Meanwhile, interoperability aspects beyond semantics are still rarely covered. Interoperability is a central problem in the Internet of Things because the increase in IoT vendors has led to a landscape of separated IoT platform ecosystems. The true value of the IoT lies in cross-platform collaboration of IoT systems for solving complex, higher-level tasks. This requires, among semantics, to address intentional and contextual aspects of interoperability to produce dynamic solutions that meet user expectations. In this short paper we describe the IoT from a digital ecosystem perspective and the resulting requirements for interoperability. We then propose a formalized approach to deal with these challenges and present an outlook of our upcoming work on this topic.