An ontology for the automated deployment of applications in heterogeneous IoT environments 1

In the near future, Internet of Things should integrate an extremely large amount of heterogeneous entities. To tackle heterogeneity, these entities will need to be consistently and formally represented and managed (registered, aligned, composed and queried) trough suitable abstraction technologies. Two distinct types of these entities are a) sensing/actuating devices that observe some features of interest or act on some other entities (call it ‘smart entities’), and b) applications that utilize the data sensed from or sent to the smart entities (call it ‘control entities’). The aim of this paper is to present an ontology as the key technology for the abstraction of these entities, towards supporting the automated deployment of control entities in settings where smart entities have been already deployed. In specific, the paper presents the use of this technology to support the following required distinct tasks of this deployment process: a) the semantic registration of heterogeneous IoT entities, b) the alignment of IoT entities’ metadata and use of these alignments for the matchmaking between smart and control entities, and c) the alignment of the semantics of the data of the messages that are exchanged between these IoT entities during device-to-application communication. The paper presents a use case scenario and the formal definitions of the main concepts and properties of the proposed ontology. Furthermore, the paper presents a proof-of-concept-based ontology evaluation approach.