INVESTIGATION OF THE ONTOLOGIES IN THE DOMAIN OF THE INTERNET OF THINGS
Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) has flourished remarkably, attracting the use of billions of heterogeneous devices that produce massive data volumes in various fields of application. The process of managing, integrating, and interpreting this data in a manner that is meaningful remains a major challenge due to differences in data formats, communication protocols, as well as semantic representations. Ontologies have become one of the primary facilitators to counter these issues through offering a common and machine-readable conceptualization of the entities, relationships, and processes of the IoT. This research work examines and classifies the various types of IoT ontologies, specifically focusing on popular standards like the Semantic Sensor Network ontology (SSN) and its lightweight version, the Sensor, Observation, Sample and Actuator (SOSA) ontology. The paper also studies a number of other domain-specific and cross-domain IoT ontologies other than SSN and SOSA, and identifies how these ontologies represent sensors, observations, actuators, platforms, and contextual information. Moreover, the paper will determine and discuss the essential requirements of ontologies in the IoT domain. Such needs are interoperability of different devices and platforms, support of sensitive data through security and privacy, seamless integration with other systems and standards, and flexibility to meet the changing application requirements. Lastly, the paper offers an analytical comparison of available ontologies of IoT by looking at the reuse of the core concepts in different models. The comparison is carried out with the aid of a set of characteristics such as energy awareness, security support, context modeling capabilities, reasoning support, ontology language, ontology type, and expert validation. Through this comparative analysis, the results will guide researchers and practitioners to choose, design, and scale the ontologies that can be more useful in the scalable, secure, and interoperable IoT applications.
