An ontology based scheme for sensor description in context awareness system

Sensor networks have been developed with an exponential speed in the last few decades. Sensor nodes are deployed to collect information for environmental monitoring, traffic control, civil information construction and other context awareness systems. The existing problems for sensor networks are sensor management and data sharing between sensors. Different ontology development methodologies and frameworks have been proposed by many research groups in various areas. They all agree that ontology is an adequate methodology to model sensors and their features, and allows data to be processed by machines. This paper proposes an ontology based scheme for describing sensors and their features. The suggested ontology is implemented using Protégé 4.3 and eventually evaluated utilizing the SPARQL language (Simple Protocol and RDF Query Language). The effectiveness of the presented ontology is proved by applying it to a building management system.