Abstracting Interactions with IoT Devices Towards a Semantic Vision of Smart Spaces

Date

2019-11-13

Department

Program

Citation of Original Publication

Yus, Roberto, Georgios Bouloukakis, Sharad Mehrotra, and Nalini Venkatasubramanian. “Abstracting Interactions with IoT Devices Towards a Semantic Vision of Smart Spaces.” In Proceedings of the 6th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation, 91–100. BuildSys ’19. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1145/3360322.3360859.

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Subjects

Abstract

This paper describes a middleware framework for IoT smart spaces, SemIoTic, that provides application developers and end-users with the semantic domain-relevant view of the smart space, hiding the complexity of having to deal with/understand lower-level information generated by sensors and actuators. SemIoTic uses a meta-model, based on the popular SOSA/SSN ontology with some extensions, to represent relationships between the low-level IoT devices' world (i.e., devices, observations) and semantic concepts (i.e., users and spaces and their observable attributes). It supports a language using which users can express their action requirements (i.e., requests for sensor data, commands for actuators, and privacy preferences) in terms of user-friendly high-level concepts. We present an ontology-based algorithmic approach to translate user-defined actions into sensor/actuators commands. Finally, our end-to-end approach includes a cross-layer solution to provide interoperability with diverse IoT devices and their data exchange protocols.