A Knowledge Model for IoT-Enabled Smart Banking

With the evolution of technologies around the world, a new era of smart communities is evolving. Research on smart communities has risen in the past years. Smart communities consist of smart objects that sense the environment and intelligently interact with the environment to deliver the right service to stakeholders. Smart banking is an example of a smart community where different types of sensors can be used to capture real time data for decision-making in the banking sector. The data are heterogeneous in nature, thus hindering exchange between different devices and systems. To allow seamless communication among the different systems and devices, a data model providing shared comprehension is desirable. Knowledge models such as ontologies are seen as a promising way to represent data and promote semantic interoperability. Ontologies additionally enable reasoning of collected data and enhance decision-making. After analyzing existing ontologies in the banking sector, it was observed that none really fitted an IoT-enabled smart banking environment. In this paper, we thus propose an ontology entitled Bank_IOT for such an environment that promotes cooperation between customers and different partners. A motivation scenario justifying the need for such an ontology has been additionally described in the paper. Competency questions have been defined with respect to the scenario and SWRL rules are generated for reasoning purposes. Bank_IOT has been evaluated based on different metrics and SPARQL queries for answering the competency questions.