An Exposition of a Lightweight Domain-specific Ontology for the Interoperability of the Internet of Things Patterns

Proper knowledge representation and conceptual analysis often require clear ontological support. This is particularly true for large domains in which explicit formal specifications of the terms is required for encoding knowledge, thus making it understandable to the end users. In the Internet of Things (IoT), there is a substantial development of solutions for a wide range of devices and IoT platforms. These solutions are based on existing known patterns which require interoperability for seamless connection and cross-platform resource sharing. However, to the best of our knowledge, pattern relationships for facilitating interoperability in the IoT are undocumented. The activity of developing a domain-specific ontology for the interoperability of the IoT patterns is therefore one of the fundamental steps in the organization of the IoT paradigm. It is clear, however, that this activity as well as other engineering activities, particularly with regard to the development of ontologies is often made complex by the use of confusing semantic terminologies and dense ontological structures. This often lead to ontological explicative horrors in which the essence of the ontology is hidden instead of highlighted. In this paper, we thus prefer to develop a lightweight ontology that clearly display relational dimensions between the IoT patterns. We use empirical analysis to identify core objects underneath the interoperability of the IoT technologies and patterns at a large-scale.

I. Introduction

The Internet of things, first coined by Kevin Ashton almost 20 years ago, has been gaining momentum in a broad range of domain areas such as health, retail, manufacturing, etc [1]. The IoT is understood to refer to the connection of physical digital objects or things to the internet. The future vision of the IoT is a technological revolution in which virtual and physical things will be entirely connected to each other and to the evolving internet infrastructure. In the literature, the IoT is defined differently by authors and research bodies. According to the European Research Cluster on the Internet of Things (IERC) [2], the IoT refers to