Building the Semantic Web of Things Through a Dynamic Ontology

Abstract

The Web of Things (WoT) has recently appeared as the latest evolution of the Internet of Things and, as the name suggests, requires that devices interoperate through the Internet using Web protocols and standards. Currently, only a few theoretical approaches have been presented by researchers and industry, to fight the fragmentation of the IoT world through the adoption of semantics. This further evolution is known as Semantic WoT and relies on a WoT implementation crafted on the technologies proposed by the Semantic Web stack. This article presents a working implementation of the WoT declined in its Semantic flavor through the adoption of a shared ontology for describing devices. In addition to that, the ontology includes patterns for dynamic interactions between devices, and therefore we define it as dynamic ontology. A practical example will give a proof of concept and overall evaluation, showing how the dynamic setup proposed can foster interoperability at information level allowing on the one hand smart discovery, enabling on the other hand orchestration and automatic interaction through the semantic information available.