On Application of Ontology and Consensus Theory to Human-Centric IoT: an Emergency Management Case Study

Involving human in the loop of IoT offers numerous advantages to a wide range of applications including emergency management. However, building a collaborative system that is capable of effectively responding to an emergency in timely manner introduces a number of fundamental challenges. It requires effective discovery of crowds for a given emergency and also successful communication of information across discovered crowds of different domains. In addition, the crowds may not agree on a single solution when group decision making is required. Therefore, consensus management such that consensus is achieved in a timely manner is yet another challenge. In this research, we propose a framework that uses ontology-based discovery and data modelling and consensus theory to tackle the aforementioned issues. We demonstrate the efficiency of the discovery and consensus management approach via a case study and set of experiments, respectively.