Interoperability issues and challenges for IoT
Services and Resources
Payam Barnaghi
Centre for Communication Systems Research
University of Surrey
Guildford, UK
IoT Interoperability workshop
26th March 2012, Paris
IoT.est – a quick snapshot
• IoT.est will develop a test-driven service creation environment
(SCE) for Internet of Things enabled business services.
• The SCE will enable the acquisition of data and
control/actuation of sensors, objects and actuators.
• The project will provide the means and tools to define and
instantiate IoT services that exploit data across domain
boundaries;
• IoT.est will facilitate run-time monitoring and will enable
autonomous service adaptation to environment/context and network parameter (e.g. QoS) changes.
IoT.est: The Key issues
• IoT enabled Business Services: Semantic Description
• Service Composition: A Knowledge based Approach
• Service Components: Re-usable, Interoperable and Adaptive
• Abstraction: Mapping to Heterogeneous Platforms and Large
Scale Deployment
• Testing (Design Time): Automated Generation of Tests
• Monitoring (Run-Time): Context-aware Service Adaptation
Requirements
• Structured representation of identified IoT concepts
– Machine-interpretable descriptions
– Reasoning mechanisms
• Homogeneous access mechanism to heterogeneous objects
with diverse capabilities
• Automated interactions and horizontal integration with existing
applications
Modelling Things and IoT Resources
• Resource model
– Gateway, sensors, processing resources
• Entity model
– Physical world objects
• Features of interest for each entity
• Service model
– IoT services and interfaces
What are the challenges?
• The models provide the basic description frameworks, but
alignment between different models and frameworks are
required.
• Semantics are the starting point, reasoning and interpretation
of data is required for automated processes.
• Real interoperability happens when data/services from
different frameworks and providers can be interchanged and used with minimised intervention.
What are the practical steps?
• Linked data approach is a promising way of integrating data
from different sources and interlinking semantic descriptions.
• Alignment between different description models for IoT
Services/Resources/Entities;
• Proposing reference and abstract models for semantic
descriptions in IoT (e.g. similar to W3C SSN approach).
IoT.est ontology- first draft
3/29/2012 Confidential 8
9
W3C SSN Ontology
makes observations
of this type
where it is
What it
measures
units
SSN-XG ontologies
SSN-XG annotations
Thank you!
IoT.est project: Internet of Things Environment for Service Creation and Testing
http://ict-iotest.eu/iotest/
