An Ontology – based Contextual Approach for Cross-domain Applications in Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things is an ecosystem which enables objects and devices such as sensors or actuators to communicate and exchange information with each other without human intervention. One of the main challenges in the Internet of Things is the lack of semantic interoperability; devices cannot understand the meaning of raw data, due to the diversity and heterogeneity in data formats from different sources. In order to deal with semantic interoperability, the ontologies are the one way to integrate semantics to raw data; they describe an IoT system and represent the data in a standardized way. The IoT devices provide a great deal of IoT data, mainly used for specific IoT applications such as smart home, smart farming, smart cities or healthcare. Therefore, existing applications became isolated in vertical silos, each one of them use independently their own model (i.e. ontology), which makes this ontologies also limited to a specific domain. Our approach has the goal of breaking down these vertical silos and achieves a semantic interoperability across IoT domains in cross-domain applications. In this paper, we have proposed a development of a single cross-domain ontology named CDOnto, it is considered to be a generic across different IoT domains, which can be extended by domain-specific ontologies. The proposed model follows a contextual approach to organize and distinguish the combined domains (i.e. contexts) representations. In addition, the ontology allows reasoning across overlapping domains and infers a complementary and new knowledge required in cross-domain applications.