Semantic Interoperability Architecture for Pervasive Computing and Internet of Things

This paper preents a novel semantic-level interoperability architecture for pervasive computing and Internet of Things (IoT). There are two main principles in the proposed architecture. First, information and capabilities of devices are represented with Semantic Web knowledge representation technologies and interaction with devices and the physical world is achieved by accessing and modifying their virtual representations. Second, global IoT is divided into numerous local smart spaces managed by a Semantic Information Broker (SIB) that provides a means to monitor and update the virtual representation of the physical world. An integral part of the architecture is a Resolution Infrastructure that provides a means to resolve the network address of a SIB either by using a physical object identifier as a pointer to information or by searching SIBs matching a specification represented with SPARQL. We present several reference implementations and applications that we have developed to evaluate the architecture in practice. The evaluation also includes performance studies that, together with the applications, demonstrate the suitability of the architecture to real-life IoT scenarios.