An Ontology-based Approach to Facilitate Semantic Interoperability of Context-Aware Systems

Semantic interoperability is one of the most critical challenges for software developers while integrating two or more context-aware systems. In such circumstances, it is essential to understand the meaning and interpretation of various contexts in different business domains and to align context ontologies together. Our investigations reveal that existing works poorly address these requirements. To fill this gap, this paper proposes the Ontology as a Service (OaaS) approach to facilitate the semantic interoperability of context-aware systems. In the proposed solution, the complexities of semantic interoperability are resolved and handled by a standalone ontology service, which can be easily reused and consumed by different ontology service consumers and brokers. The proposed ontology service includes several ontology repositories, a web service that positions a context concept in the existing ontologies and another web service that maps the relationship between existing context concepts. We evaluated our approach with a case study that resolves three semantic differences between two IoT applications originating from heterogeneous domains of smart home and health environments.