Semantic-Based Knowledge Dissemination and Extraction in Smart Environments

The merging of Semantic Web technologies and the Internet of Things is originating the so-called Semantic Web of Things (SWoT), which promises to seamlessly integrate the real and digital worlds, to further enhance the available services in smart spaces and to increase the number of communicating users and objects. This paper presents a semantic content-centric framework enabling cooperative environments where resources can be discovered, queried and inventoried by autonomous objects in a peer-to-peer, collaborative way, without requiring a central control and coordination. Logic-based standard and non-standard inference services can be exploited in matchmaking and negotiation for service/resource discovery and on-the-fly reasoning, as well as for large-scale analyses. Features of the proposed approach are detailed and discussed w.r.t. the key requirements and research challenges of next-generation smart cities and factory automation.