Semantic interoperability in the Internet of Things: An overview from the INTER-IoT perspective

The Internet of Things (IoT) idea, explored across the globe, brings about an important issue: how to achieve interoperability among multiple existing (and constantly created) IoT platforms. In this context, in January 2016, the European Commission has funded seven projects that are to deal with various aspects of interoperability in the Internet of Things. Among them, the INTER-IoT project is aiming at the design and implementation of, and experimentation with, an open cross-layer framework and associated methodology to provide voluntary interoperability among heterogeneous IoT platforms. While the project considers interoperability across all layers of the software stack, we are particularly interested in answering the question: how ontologies and semantic data processing can be harnessed to facilitate interoperability across the IoT landscape. Henceforth, we have engaged in a “fact finding mission” to establish what is currently at our disposal when semantic interoperability is concerned. Since the INTER-IoT project is initially driven by two use cases originating from (i) (e/m)Health and (ii) transportation and logistics, these two application domains were used to provide context for our search. The paper summarizes our findings and provides foundation for developing methods and tools for supporting semantic interoperability in the INTER-IoT project (and beyond).