Semantic Interoperability in Internet of Things

Abstract

With every passing day, we are connecting more devices to the Internet. These devices are of various types, ranging from personal devices (e.g., cell phones, computers, televisions, game consoles, home appliances controllers) to industrial devices (e.g. industrial robots, navigation equipment, medical equipment, self-driving vehicles, digitized monitoring of machines). The interaction of such devices over the Internet without the human intervention introduced a new concept of connectivity named Internet of Things. Where the Internet of Things opens the possibilities for new services, it also brings a few problems alongside. One of those problems is to understand the intended meaning and context of the communication. A successful communication is comprised of two parts, to exchange data between the communicating parties and a common agreement on the meanings of the data. This whole process of exchanging data and perceiving the intended meaning of the data is called Interoperability. The latter part of the interoperability process, where one needs to perceive the intended meaning of the data is called Semantic Interoperability.

The present communication methods in the Internet of Things are good enough to successfully exchange data, but, they do not provide enough information to realize the intended meaning of the data. Thus, we need a solution to provide Semantic Interoperability in the Internet of Things. A major problem with the Internet of Things is that the majority of the IoT devices are resource constrained. Therefore, the required solution should solve the Semantic Interoperability problem while considering the limitations of the constrained devices. This thesis describes and implements a solution to solve the Semantic Interoperability problem in the Internet of Things.