IoT using Semantic Technology

Question

I am trying to use semantic technologies in IOT. From the last two months I am doing literature survey and during this time I came to know some of the tools required like (protege, Apache Jena). Now along with reading papers I want to play with semantic techniques like annotation, linking data etc so that I can get the better understanding of the concepts involved. For the same I have put the roadmap as:

1. Collect data manually (using sensors) or use some data set already on the web.
2. Annotate the dataset and possibly use ontology (not sure)
3. Apply open linking data principles I am not sure whether this road map is correct or not. I am asking for suggestions in following points

Is this roadmap correct? How should I approach for steps 2 and 3. In other words which tools should I use for these steps?

Hope you guys can help me in finding a proper way for handling this issue. Thanks

Answer 1

Semantics and IoT (or semantic sensor web) is a hot topic. Congratulations that you choose a interesting and worth pursuing research topic.

In my opinion, your three steps approach looks good. I would recommend you to do a quick prototype so you can learn the possible challenges early.

In addition to the implementation technologies (Portege, etc.), there are some important works might be useful for you:

1. Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE). It is an important work for sharing and exchanging sensor observation data. Many large organizations (NOAA, NASA, NRCan, AAFC, ESA, etc.) have adopted this standard. This standard has defined a conceptual data model/ontology (O&M, ISO 19156). Note: this is a very comprehensive standard, hence it's very BIG and can be time consuming to read. I recommend to read #2 mentioned below.

2. OGC SensorThings API (http://ogc-iot.github.io/ogc-iot-api/), a IoT cloud API standard based on the OGC SWE. This might be most relevant to you. It is a light-weight protocol of the SWE family, and designed specifically for IoT. Some early research work has been done to use JSON-LD to annotate SensorThings.

3. W3C Spatial Data on Web (http://www.w3.org/2015/spatial/wiki/Main_Page). It is an on-going joint work between W3C and OGC. Part of the goal is to mature SSN (Semantic Sensor Network) ontology. Once it's ready, the new SSN can be used to annotate SensorThings API for example. A work worth to monitor.