Modeling Inhabited Smart Spaces to Support Interoperable IoT-Based Applications

Abstract

IoT deployments in smart spaces can enable the development of useful services for their inhabitants. However, the diversity of smart spaces and their sensor infrastructures makes it challenging to develop space-agnostic applications. Moreover, existing schemas addressing interoperability challenges often lack the vocabulary needed to represent the integration of smart space systems and their inhabitants. We present a schema to annotate inhabited smart spaces in support of inhabitant-oriented applications. Our schema integrates well-known ontologies to represent inhabitants, events/activities, and the space itself, along with their interconnections. It also supports the representation of uncertain information from IoT and mobile sensors (e.g., a person's location or occupancy/attendance at an event). Additionally, we introduce an annotation tool that uses an easy-to-use GUI to describe a smart space based on our schema. We demonstrate the potential of our approach through a series of SPARQL queries and a system deployed at the UCI campus that annotates sensor data to support a space-agnostic occupancy monitoring application.