Interoperability issues and challenges for IoT Services and Resources, presented at the IoT Interoperability workshop, Paris, France, 26 March 2012

1. Interoperability issues and challenges for IoT
Services and Resources
Payam Barnaghi
Centre for Communication Systems Research
University of Surrey
Guildford, UK
IoT Interoperability workshop
26th March 2012, Paris

2. 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.

3. IoT.est: The Key issues
• IoT enabled Business Services: Semantic Description
• 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

4. Requirements
• Structured representation of identified IoT concepts
– Machine-interpretable descriptions
– Reasoning mechanisms
• Homogeneous access mechanism to heterogeneous objects
with diverse capabilities
• Automated interactions and horizontal integration with existing
applications

5. Modelling Things and IoT Resources
• Resource model
– Gateway, sensors, processing resources
• Entity model
– Physical world objects
• Features of interest for each entity
• Service model
– IoT services and interfaces

6. What are the challenges?
• The models provide the basic description frameworks, but
alignment between different models and frameworks are
required.
• Semantics are the starting point, reasoning and interpretation
of data is required for automated processes.
• Real interoperability happens when data/services from
different frameworks and providers can be interchanged and
used with minimised intervention.

7. What are the practical steps?
• Linked data approach is a promising way of integrating data
from different sources and interlinking semantic descriptions.
• Alignment between different description models for IoT
Services/Resources/Entities;
• Proposing reference and abstract models for semantic
descriptions in IoT (e.g. similar to W3C SSN approach).

8. IoT.est ontology- first draft
3/29/2012 Confidential 8

9. 9
W3C SSN Ontology
makes observations
of this type
where it is
What it
measures
units
SSN-XG ontologies
SSN-XG annotations

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