A semantic-enabled platform for realizing an interoperable web of things

Abstract

Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem is experiencing a lack of interoperability across the multiple competing platforms that are available. Consequently, service providers can only access vertical data silos that imply high costs and jeopardize their solutions market potential. It is necessary to transform the current situation with competing non-interoperable IoT platforms into a common ecosystem enabling the emergence of cross-platform, cross-standard, and cross-domain IoT services and applications. This paper presents a platform that has been implemented for realizing this vision. It leverages semantic web technologies to address the two key challenges in expanding the IoT beyond product silos into web-scale open ecosystems: data interoperability and resources identification and discovery. The paper provides extensive description of the proposed solution and its implementation details. Regarding the implementation details, it is important to highlight that the platform described in this paper is currently supporting the federation of eleven IoT deployments (from heterogeneous application domains) with over 10,000 IoT devices overall which produce hundreds of thousands of observations per day.