A Semantic Model for Service Description in the Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) applications are seen as complex eco-systems regarding their features such as the high diversity of entities and the open, heterogeneous, and dynamic nature of IoT environments. As a consequence, data interpretation and processing capacity, scalability, reuse, and autonomous decision-making are strongly restricted and compromised for the top level systems. To tackle these issues, Semantic Technologies are considered a solution, due to their provided tools and techniques, to address this diversity. In this work, we present an abstract and complete semantic model for IoT service-based applications. It takes into account the high diversity of IoT systems, the specific IoT environment characteristics, and the interactions of users with whole IoT platforms. A modular and generic knowledge model, that allows semantic definition and representation of applications, entities (spaces and/or objects), IoT devices, IoT services, domain ontologies, user requests, etc., is put forward. This ontological model improves semantic searching and querying capabilities by hiding the heterogeneity of entities and their produced data. It allows designers to choose without any restriction the appropriate public and/or private ontologies. The use-case scenarios test shows clearly the interest, feasibility, and suitability of the proposed knowledge model for the IoT applications.