Naming, Search and Discovery in IoTIssues and proposed solutions in the FP7 EU IoT.est Project

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

Consortium

• 8 partners, 7 countries

• Project Lead: CCSR, University of Surrey

• Started in: October 2011

Industry PTIN, ATOS, SIE SME TT, AI

Research Centre NICT

Higher Education UNIS, UASO

IoT.est

• IoT + SOA + Test– Our focus is on IoT-enabled SOA + Test

• IoT.est will not implement another IoT platform– We assume low-level connectivity, information communication and

device-level services are provided by other IoT platforms.

– We work on IoT-enabled service life-cycle support and brining “Test” to IoT service and system design, implementation and deployment.

• However, naming and discovery is also an issue for IoT.est.

Naming and Discovery issues

• How to name, find and access the IoT resources, services and test/service modules. – Service designers need to know:

• What resources are available • Where they come from• How to access them

– We consider using reusable test components to evaluate and/or validate:

• Availability• Reliability • Adaptability• …

Using semantic data

• Semantic data for modelling and describing– Resources

• Gateway, sensors, processing resources– Entities

• Physical world objects – Features of interest for each entity

– Services• IoT services and interfaces

– Test functions and test modules • (semantic) TTCN3?

IoT.est ontology- first draft

5/9/2012 Confidential 8

Linked data approach

• IoT resources will be addressed by a URI.• By referring to a URI, we will be able to receive meaningful

information about a resource (semantic annotation).• A URI will define the service interface to interact with IoT

resources. • The low-level name resolution could be handled by other existing

framework or component or an abstraction layer in the case of 6LowPAN and CoAp.

– directly (with some intermediaries) – or on other non-IP platforms we need an overlay layer or a

middleware (gateway) to represent the IoT resources (virtualisation).

Discovery

• IoT.est will provide an integrated semantic annotation framework to describe IoT resources, entities, services and test functionalities.

• The search and discovery will be based on the attributes of the resources/entities and services described in the semantic annotations.

• So this will be more a semantic search and reasoning issue.

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).

• However, semantic data processing is not often easy in resource constrained environments (such as IoT)– Binary RDF or N3 could be potential solutions.

• Distribution of resources and scalability of solutions are also other key challenges.

Thank you!