A Flexible Framework for Representations of Entities in the Internet of Things

Abstract

The ultimate goal of the internet of things is to integrate virtual world and physical world seamlessly. The first and basic issue is how to represent an entity comprehensively and exactly in the virtual. To address this issue, we first clarify the concepts related to physical entities in the internet of things, and their relationships. Then, we propose a flexible framework, whose core part is a metadata model of entities, to describe entities at syntactic and semantic level, respectively. Based on the framework, the machine-readable syntactic representations are generated to support data repository and exchange for entities. In order to support automated large scale application scenarios, the terms in metadata model have to refer to several popular vocabularies, standards or ontologies to achieve the machine-interpretable and machine-processible semantic representations. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.