An Ontology for an IoT-enabled Smart Classroom in a University Campus

Smart cities represent conceptual urban development to improve people's lives by providing them with better and effective services. Worldwide research is currently being carried out to meet this vision. The Internet of Things (IoT) play a vital role in providing effective solutions for smart cities. An IoT-enabled smart classroom is one example of IoT application developed in the context of a smart city. The smart classroom makes use of devices and sensors to facilitate learning among learners. Interoperability is one key challenge being faced by smart applications where diverse systems have to interact with each other. The data and data format exchanged by one system often differ from other systems leading to interoperability problems. Semantic interoperability refers to unambiguous access and interpretation of data by different communicating parties, ensuring a common meaning of data exchanged. To ensure semantic interoperability, ontologies are being used to provide semantics in terms of common vocabulary and to facilitate exchange of information between different systems. This paper therefore presents an ontology for an IoT-enabled smart classroom in a university campus to handle semantic interoperability issues in a smart campus environment, taking into consideration new paradigms like the IoT and pedagogical concepts like learner analytics.