Enhancing the Utilization of IoT Devices Using Ontological Semantics and Reasoning

This research in progress work demonstrates how the formal, model-theoretic semantics of ontologies can be used for complementing the technical specifications of Internet of Things (IoT) devices with additional high-level information derived from domain ontologies in order to enhance utilization and interoperability. The presented approach substantiates the assumption that a more elaborated description about a device's capabilities and its features helps in integrating it in different system contexts and fosters interoperability among different IoT devices. We show how basic technical information represented as RDF data can be used to automatically classify IoT devices, how default capabilities can be deduced from these classifications, and how advanced features can be inferred using domain semantics and formal reasoning. The applicability of the presented approach in real world settings is demonstrated by a concrete example from an IoT use case.