Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) comprises vertically oriented platforms for things. Developers who want to use them need to negotiate access individually and adapt to the platform-specific API ...and information models. Having to perform these actions for each platform often outweighs the possible gains from adapting applications to multiple platforms. This fragmentation of the IoT and the missing interoperability result in high entry barriers for developers and prevent the emergence of broadly accepted IoT ecosystems. The BIG IoT (Bridging the Interoperability Gap of the IoT) project aims to ignite an IoT ecosystem as part of the European Platforms Initiative. As part of the project, researchers have devised an IoT ecosystem architecture. It employs five interoperability patterns that enable cross-platform interoperability and can help establish successful IoT ecosystems.
The Sensor, Observation, Sample, and Actuator (SOSA) ontology provides a formal but lightweight general-purpose specification for modellingthe interaction between the entities involved in the acts of ...observation, actuation, and sampling. SOSA is the result of rethinking the W3C-XG Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) ontology based on changes in scope and target audience, technical developments, and lessons learned over the past years. SOSA also acts as a replacement of SSN’s Stimulus Sensor Observation (SSO) core. It has been developed by the first joint working group of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on Spatial Data on the Web. In this work, we motivate the need for SOSA, provide an overview of the main classes and properties, and briefly discuss its integration with the new release of the SSN ontology as well as various other alignments to specifications such as OGC’s Observations and Measurements (O&M), Dolce-Ultralite (DUL), and other prominent ontologies. We will also touch upon common modelling problems and application areas related to publishing and searching observation, sampling, and actuation data on the Web. The SOSA ontology and standard can be accessed at https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-ssn/.
To enable efficiency in stream processing, the evaluation of a query is usually performed over bounded parts of (potentially) unbounded streams, i.e., processing windows “slide” over the streams. To ...avoid inefficient re-evaluations of already evaluated parts of a stream in respect to a query, incremental evaluation strategies are applied, i.e., the query results are obtained incrementally from the result set of the preceding processing state without having to re-evaluate all input buffers. This method is highly efficient but it comes at the cost of having to maintain processing state, which is not trivial, and may defeat performance advantages of the incremental evaluation strategy. In the context of RDF streams the problem is further aggravated by the hard-to-predict evolution of the structure of RDF graphs over time and the application of sub-optimal implementation approaches, e.g., using relational technologies for storing data and processing states which incur significant performance drawbacks for graph-based query patterns. To address these performance problems, this paper proposes a set of novel operator-aware data structures coupled with incremental evaluation algorithms which outperform the counterparts of relational stream processing systems. This claim is demonstrated through extensive experimental results on both simulated and real datasets.
The W3C Semantic Sensor Network Incubator group (the SSN-XG) produced an OWL 2 ontology to describe sensors and observations — the SSN ontology, available at http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ssnx/ssn. The ...SSN ontology can describe sensors in terms of capabilities, measurement processes, observations and deployments. This article describes the SSN ontology. It further gives an example and describes the use of the ontology in recent research projects.
The joint W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) Spatial Data on the Web (SDW) Working Group developed a set of ontologies to describe sensors, actuators, samplers as ...well as their observations, actuation, and sampling activities. The ontologies have been published both as a W3C recommendation and as an OGC implementation standard. The set includes a lightweight core module called SOSA (Sensor, Observation, Sampler, and Actuator) available at: http://www.w3.org/ns/sosa/, and a more expressive extension module called SSN (Semantic Sensor Network) available at: http://www.w3.org/ns/ssn/. Together they describe systems of sensors and actuators, observations, the used procedures, the subjects and their properties being observed or acted upon, samples and the process of sampling, and so forth. The set of ontologies adopts a modular architecture with SOSA as a self-contained core that is extended by SSN and other modules to add expressivity and breadth. The SOSA/SSN ontologies are able to support a wide range of applications and use cases, including satellite imagery, large-scale scientific monitoring, industrial and household infrastructures, social sensing, citizen science, observation-driven ontology engineering, and the Internet of Things. In this paper we give an overview of the ontologies and discuss the rationale behind key design decisions, reporting on the differences between the new SSN ontology presented here and its predecessor Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 17 (2012), 25–32 developed by the W3C Semantic Sensor Network Incubator group (the SSN-XG). We present usage examples and describe alignment modules that foster interoperability with other ontologies.
The Internet of Things (IoT) with billions of connected devices has been generating an enormous amount of data every hour. Connecting every data item generated by IoT to the rest of the digital world ...to turn this data into meaningful actions will create new capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented economic opportunities for businesses, individuals, and countries. However, providing an integrated view for exploring and querying such data at real-time is extremely challenging due to its Big Data natures: big volume, fast real-time update and messy data sources. To address this challenge, we provide a unified integrated and live view for heterogeneous IoT data sources using Linked Data, called the Graph of Things (GoT). GoT is backed by a scalable and elastic software stack to deal with billions of records of historical and static datasets in conjunction with millions of triples being fetched and enriched to connect to GoT per hour in real time. GoT makes approximately a half of million stream data sources queryable via a SPARQL endpoint and a continuous query channel that enable us to create a live explorer of GoT (http://graphofthings.org/) with just HTML and Javascript.
Semantic interoperability for the Internet of Things (IoT) is enabled by standards and technologies from the Semantic Web. As recent research suggests a move towards decentralised IoT architectures, ...we have investigated the scalability and robustness of RDF (Resource Description Framework)engines that can be embedded throughout the architecture, in particular at edge nodes. RDF processing at the edge facilitates the deployment of semantic integration gateways closer to low-level devices. Our focus is on how to enable scalable and robust RDF engines that can operate on lightweight devices. In this paper, we have first carried out an empirical study of the scalability and behaviour of solutions for RDF data management on standard computing hardware that have been ported to run on lightweight devices at the network edge. The findings of our study shows that these RDF store solutions have several shortcomings on commodity ARM (Advanced RISC Machine) boards that are representative of IoT edge node hardware. Consequently, this has inspired us to introduce a lightweight RDF engine, which comprises an RDF storage and a SPARQL processor for lightweight edge devices, called RDF4Led. RDF4Led follows the RISC-style (Reduce Instruction Set Computer) design philosophy. The design constitutes a flash-aware storage structure, an indexing scheme, an alternative buffer management technique and a low-memory-footprint join algorithm that demonstrates improved scalability and robustness over competing solutions. With a significantly smaller memory footprint, we show that RDF4Led can handle 2 to 5 times more data than popular RDF engines such as Jena TDB (Tuple Database) and RDF4J, while consuming the same amount of memory. In particular, RDF4Led requires 10%-30% memory of its competitors to operate on datasets of up to 50 million triples. On memory-constrained ARM boards, it can perform faster updates and can scale better than Jena TDB and Virtuoso. Furthermore, we demonstrate considerably faster query operations than Jena TDB and RDF4J.
This paper introduces the stack for service delivery models and interoperability in the Internet of Things. The main characteristics and functional layers of the IoT stack are described. The ...applicability of the IoT stack is described based on particular use cases and deployed pilots. The validation of the IoT stack in terms of functionality and adaptation at different IoT particular areas is based on the Virtual Development Kit (VDK) developed and implemented within the framework of the OpenIoT project-OpenIoT project is the awarded Internet of Things open-source rookie of the year by BlackDuck Software Co. (www.github.com/OpenIotOrg). The methods and standards that boosted OpenIoT-VDK implementation are described in this paper. An instance of the OpenIoT-VDK process is described as the practical use case demonstrating being an IoT platform with autonomic behavior. OpenIoT-VDK creates IoT instances, analyzes the IoT stack dependence, and resolves them following interoperability principles. The OpenIoT-VDK instance deploys IoT service delivery models facilitating the validation of use cases by using the OpenIoT platform. As proof of concept, a delivered IoT service using open data from OpenIoT local instantiation is described.
In this paper we address the problem of scalable, native and adaptive query processing over Linked Stream Data integrated with Linked Data. Linked Stream Data consists of data generated by stream ...sources, e.g., sensors, enriched with semantic descriptions, following the standards proposed for Linked Data. This enables the integration of stream data with Linked Data collections and facilitates a wide range of novel applications. Currently available systems use a “black box” approach which delegates the processing to other engines such as stream/event processing engines and SPARQL query processors by translating to their provided languages. As the experimental results described in this paper show, the need for query translation and data transformation, as well as the lack of full control over the query execution, pose major drawbacks in terms of efficiency. To remedy these drawbacks, we present CQELS (Continuous Query Evaluation over Linked Streams), a native and adaptive query processor for unified query processing over Linked Stream Data and Linked Data. In contrast to the existing systems, CQELS uses a “white box” approach and implements the required query operators natively to avoid the overhead and limitations of closed system regimes. CQELS provides a flexible query execution framework with the query processor dynamically adapting to the changes in the input data. During query execution, it continuously reorders operators according to some heuristics to achieve improved query execution in terms of delay and complexity. Moreover, external disk access on large Linked Data collections is reduced with the use of data encoding and caching of intermediate query results. To demonstrate the efficiency of our approach, we present extensive experimental performance evaluations in terms of query execution time, under varied query types, dataset sizes, and number of parallel queries. These results show that CQELS outperforms related approaches by orders of magnitude.
Recently, many approaches have been proposed to manage sensor data using semantic web technologies for effective heterogeneous data integration. However, our empirical observations revealed that ...these solutions primarily focused on semantic relationships and unfortunately paid less attention to spatio–temporal correlations. Most semantic approaches do not have spatio–temporal support. Some of them have attempted to provide full spatio–temporal support, but have poor performance for complex spatio–temporal aggregate queries. In addition, while the volume of sensor data is rapidly growing, the challenge of querying and managing the massive volumes of data generated by sensing devices still remains unsolved. In this article, we introduce EAGLE, a spatio–temporal query engine for querying sensor data based on the linked data model. The ultimate goal of EAGLE is to provide an elastic and scalable system which allows fast searching and analysis with respect to the relationships of space, time and semantics in sensor data. We also extend SPARQL with a set of new query operators in order to support spatio–temporal computing in the linked sensor data context.
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