NLP-based Generation of Ontological System Descriptions for Composition of Smart Home Devices

With the current rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) technology and the widespread popularity of smart home devices, wireless technology has made it possible for IoT devices to integrate with each other in a complex system. Previous works have proposed utilizing ontological descriptions, called Holons, of IoT devices and subsystems to reason about the construction of systems. The holonic description, defined by an ontology, includes parameters, services, and properties of the IoT device. However, these previous works assume that Holon descriptions of IoT devices are already provided e.g., by vendors. This assumption requires device vendors and system engineers to manually create descriptions, which is time-consuming and error-prone given the increasing number of IoT devices that are offered in the market. This paper introduces a method for the automatic generation of Holon descriptions of IoT devices. This method uses the brand and model of a device and utilizes knowledge extraction in natural language processing to automatically generate the ontological description of the IoT device. The experimental results show that the proposed method can generate descriptions with a precision of 96.72% and a recall of 87.53% in a practically acceptable time.