A Comprehensive Ontology for Internet of Things (COIoT)

Abstract

In the Internet of Things (IoT), interoperability among heterogeneous entities is an important issue. Most existing solutions offer to address the interoperability by proposing a horizontal service platform to enable communication interoperability between machines. Without realizing the true meaning of data, interoperability is restricted to addressing protocols and message formats. Semantics enable interoperability in the true sense by allowing applications to be autonomic. However, most of the current ontologies for IoT mainly focus on modelling resources, services, and location information and/or define completely new ontologies defeating the purpose of using them for interoperability. Introduction of new ontologies is causing more fragmentation in building a consistent and comprehensive knowledge base for IoT. Careful reuse of existing specialized ontologies can help in developing an interoperable semantic IoT system. Comprehensive Ontology for IoT (COIoT) reuses core concepts from existing ontologies like SSN, iot-lifecycle, PowerOnt, OWL-S, GeoNames, DUL and complements concepts like policy, context, services and monitoring. Using COIoT, it is demonstrated that an interoperable semantic knowledge base for IoT environments can be built and used.