Unified IoT ontology to enable interoperability and federation of testbeds

Abstract

After a thorough analysis of existing Internet of Things (IoT) related ontologies, in this paper we propose a holistic and a light-weight ontology that aims to achieve semantic interoperability among various fragmented testbeds (that store data in their proprietary format) in IoT domain. Such ontology currently finds its implementation in the EU H2020 FIESTA-IoT project that aims to provide federation and interoperability to testbeds using semantics. The proposed ontology leverages from the Noy et al. methodology of building ontology. With the aim of including more ontologies in the future, if needed, our ontology currently reuses core concepts from various popular ontologies and taxonomies, such as Semantic Sensor Network (SSN), M3-lite (a lite version of M3 and also an outcome of this study), WGS84, IoT-lite and DUL. In addition to this, we also introduce a set of tools that aims to help external testbeds adapt their respective datasets to the common ontology defined throughout this paper. ; This work is partially funded by the European project \Federated Interoperable Semantic IoT/cloud Testbeds and Applications (FIESTA-IoT)" from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Programme with the Grant Agreement No. CNECTICT-643943. The Authors would like to also thank the FIESTA-IoT consortium for fruitful discussions.