Visual development environment for semantically interoperable smart cities applications

Abstract

This paper presents an IoT architecture for the semantic interoperability of diverse IoT systems and applications in smart cities. The architecture virtualizes diverse IoT systems and ensures their modelling and representation according to common standards-based IoT ontologies. Furthermore, based on this architecture, the paper introduces a first-of-a-kind visual development environment which eases the development of semantically interoperable applications in smart citites. The development environment comes with a range of visual tools, which enable the assembly of non-trivial data-driven applications in smart cities, including applications that leverage data streams from diverse IoT systems. Moreover, these tools allow developers to leverage the functionalities and building blocks of the presented architecture. Overall, the introduced visual environment advances the state of the art in IoT developments for smart cities towards the direction of semantic interoperability for data driven applications.