Capturing the contributions of the semantic web to the IoT: a unifying vision

TL;DR

This paper reviews how semantic web technologies address interoperability challenges in IoT applications, proposing a unifying architectural pattern and analyzing the evolution of semantic web adaptations for IoT constraints.

Contribution

It introduces the LMU-N architectural pattern to unify SWoT architectures and discusses semantic web evolutions tailored for IoT constraints.

Findings

LMU-N provides a classification framework for SWoT architectures.

Semantic web adaptations improve interoperability in IoT.

The convergence of IoT and semantic web enhances SWoT development.

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a technological topic with a very important societal impact. IoT application domains are various and include: smart cities, precision farming, smart factories, and smart buildings. The diversity of these application domains is the source of the very high technological heterogeneity in the IoT, leading to interoperability issues. The semantic web principles and technologies are more and more adopted as a solution to these interoperability issues, leading to the emergence of a new domain, the Semantic Web Of Things (SWoT). Scientific contributions to the SWoT are many, and the diversity of architectures in which they are expressed complicates comparison. To unify the presented architectures, we propose an architectural pattern, LMU-N. LMU-N provides a reading grid used to classify processes to which the SWoT community contributes, and to describe how the semantic web impacts the IoT. Then, the evolutions of the semantic web to adapt to the IoT constraints are described as well, in order to give a twofold view of the convergence between the IoT and the semantic web toward the SWoT.