P Barnaghi, Semantic Interoperability Issues and Approaches in the IoT.est Project, at the IERC AC4 Semantic interoperability Workshop (during the IoT-week 2012), Venice, Italy, 19 June 2012

1. Semantic Interoperability Issues and
Approaches in the IoT.est Project
Payam Barnaghi
Centre for Communication Systems Research
University of Surrey
Guildford, UK
IERC AC4 Semantic interoperability Workshop
19 June, 2012, Venice, Italy

2. Consortium
• 8 partners, 7 countries
• Project Lead:
CCSR, University of Surrey
• Duration:
36 months
Industry PTIN, ATOS, SIE
SME TT, AI
Research Centre NICT
Higher Education UNIS, UASO

3. IoT.est – a quick snapshot
• IoT.est will develop a test-driven service creation environment (SCE)
for Internet of Things enabled business services.
• The SCE will enable the acquisition of data and control/actuation of
sensors, objects and actuators.
• The project will provide the means and tools to define and instantiate
IoT services that exploit data across domain boundaries;
• IoT.est will facilitate run-time monitoring and will enable autonomous
service adaptation to environment/context and network parameter
(e.g. QoS) changes.

4. IoT.est: The Key issues
• IoT enabled Business Services: Machine interpretable (semantic)
descriptions
• Service Composition: A Knowledge based approach
• Service Components: Re-usable, interoperable and adaptive
• Abstraction: Mapping to heterogeneous platforms and large scale
deployment
• Testing (Design Time): Automated generation of tests
• Monitoring (Run-Time): Context-aware service adaptation
• This requires: machine interpretable description + interoperable domain
knowledge + automated discovery and composition, reasoning and
decision making

5. (1a) Semantic and data models in IoT.est
• Service model
– IoT.est service model, IoT-A service model, OWL-S
• Entity and resource models
– IoT models, W3C SSN
• Test models and Test component descriptions
• Common models and knowledge-based to describe the
domain knowledge (e.g. LOD)
– Linked Sensor (IoT) data approach

6. (1b) Applications to use and/or need for semantic
modeling practices
• Linked data approach
– using URI’s as names for things;
– using HTTP URI’s to look up those names;
– providing useful RDF information related to URI’s
– including RDF statements that link to other URI’s
• Access and discovery mechanisms and interfaces
– Logical reasoning and querying large scale data
• Ontology alignment and ontology mapping
– Semi-automated and manual alignment
– Developing alignment and enhancement tools

7. (1c) Languages (formal/non-formal), Technologies
(toolkits, SW tools), protocols enabling semantic
interoperability
• RDF/OWL representations
– We are also investigating alternative representation and
reasoning mechanisms for constrained environments (e.g.
Binary RDF, IETF approach)
• Ontology design tools
– Protégé
• Common Interface and access end-points
– Standard interface and service models (e.g. OGC SoS,
SPARQL end-points, etc).
• Ontology mapping and alignment
– Ontology engineering phase
– Automated tools

8. (1d) Possible contributions/inputs to AC4
• Comprehensive semantic models for IoT
– Integrated service, entity, resource models
– Test models and test components
• Alignment tools and reference models
• Practical uses-case and methodology to create linked
IoT data.

9. References for semantic interoperability
• Suparna De, Payam Barnaghi, Martin Bauer, Stefan Meissner, "Service modelling for the Internet
of Things", In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems
(FedCSIS), pp.949-955, Sept. 2011.
• Payam Barnaghi, Mirko Presser, Klaus Moessner, "Publishing Linked Sensor Data", In
Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Semantic Sensor Networks (SSN), Organised
in conjunction with the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2010, November 2010.
• Michael Compton, Payam Barnaghi, Luis Bermudez, Raul Garcia-Castro, Oscar Corcho, Simon
Cox, John Graybeal, Manfred Hauswirth, Cory Henson, Arthur Herzog, Vincent Huang, Krzysztof
Janowicz, W. David Kelsey, Danh Le Phuoc, Laurent Lefort, Myriam Leggieri, Holger Neuhaus,
Andriy Nikolov, Kevin Page, Alexandre Passant, Amit Sheth, Kerry Taylor. "The SSN Ontology of
the W3C Semantic Sensor Network Incubator Group", Journal of Web Semantics, 2012.
• Harshal Patni, Cory Henson, Amit Sheth, 'Linked Sensor Data,' In: Proceedings of 2010
International Symposium on Collaborative Technologies and Systems (CTS 2010), Chicago, IL,
May 17-21, 2010.
• Prateek Jain, Pascal Hitzler, Amit P. Sheth, Kunal Verma, and Peter Z. Yeh, “Ontology alignment
for linked open data”, In Proceedings of the 9th international semantic web conference on The
semantic web - Volume Part I (ISWC'10), Peter F. Patel-Schneider, Yue Pan, Pascal Hitzler,
Peter Mika, and Lei Zhang (Eds.), Vol. Part I. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 402-417, 2010.

10. IoT.est project: Internet of Things Environment for Service
Creation and Testing
http://ict-iotest.eu/iotest/