Ontology-Based Semantic Modeling and Evaluation for Internet of Things Applications

Internet of Things (IoT) is a major paradigm shift from traditional Internet applications that connects things / objects to the Internet for automatic sensing, information processing, understanding, reasoning, decision and response to virtual and physical world. Due to its highly distributed and heterogeneous characteristics, it requires more semantic interactions between different scenarios. Therefore, interoperability is one of the most fundamental requirements for IoT systems. Currently, semantic modeling for IoT applications has significant deficiency in its reusability and interoperability. In this paper, we propose a semantic information model for IoT applications, named OntoIoT. This model has a two-level architecture including a set of general upper ontology and flexible interfaces for different application domain ontology extensions. We have preliminarily implemented the OntoIoT framework and domain extension in selected scenarios of smart space and healthcare. A data-driven and other ontology evaluation approaches are used to prove the scalability and interoperability of OntoIoT. Result demonstrates that, compared to other test ontologies, Onto IoT is more suitable for the given application scenario.