Managing the Web of Things: Linking the Real World to the Web

Scholar.

Preface

Quan Z. Sheng     Sydney, Australia

Yongrui Qin     Huddersfield, England

Lina Yao     Sydney Australia

Boualem Benatallah     Sydney, Australia

Over the years, the World Wide Web has gone through many transformations, from traditional linking and sharing of computers and documents (i.e., Web of Data), to the current connection of people (i.e., Web of People), and to the emerging connection of billions of physical objects (i.e., Web of Things). Web of Things (WoT) aims to connect everyday objects, such as coats, shoes, watches, ovens, washing machines, bikes, cars, even humans, plants, animals, and changing environments, to the Internet to enable communication/interactions between these objects. The ultimate goal of WoT is to enable computers to see, hear and sense the real world. It is predicted by Ericsson that the number of Internet-connected things will reach 50 billion by 2020. Electronic devices and systems exist around us providing different services to the people in different situations: at home, at work, in their office, or driving a car on the street. WoT also enables the close relationship between human and opportunistic connection of smart things. To realize the goals of WoT and to fully exploit its potentials, building and managing the Web of Things at the global scale has created numerous challenges, as well as tremendous opportunities, to many stakeholders, including research institutions, companies, governments, and international organizations. There is an urgent need to capture related technology trends, so as to guide and help all these stakeholders to actively contribute to the promising future of WoT. WoT provides an Application Layer that simplifies the creation of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications and aims to enable real-world objects to be part of the World Wide Web, which can be achieved on top of connecting them together at a global scale in IoT. This book provides a consolidated and holistic coverage of engineering, management and analytics that advances the fundamental understanding of the Web of Things building blocks in terms of concepts, models, languages, productivity support techniques, and tools. This enables effective exploration, understanding, assessing, comparing, and selecting WoT models, languages, techniques, platforms, and tools.

Meanwhile, there is a scarcity of texts on how to manage large-scale of things over the Web. This book aims to fill this gap and serve as a primary point of reference by compiling the newest developments and advances in the area of the Web of Things. It offers a comprehensive and systematic presentation of methodologies, technologies and applications that enable efficient and effective management of things over the Web, thereby helping academic researchers, practitioners, graduate students, and governments unveil the potentials of WoT.

This book is the collection of 15 chapters that focus on the most recent developments in the field of the Web of Things. The covered new advances range from modelling, searching, data analytics, to software building, applications and social impact. Hence, this book provides a comprehensive view of the latest developments and trends in this nascent area. From the book, the reader will be able to gain up-to-date knowledge and experience on how to manage things over the Web. This can help them accelerate their research on the Web of Things (for researchers), gain immediate experiences on building the Web of Things systems (for practitioners), and support policy and decision making (for industries and government agencies).

This book would not have been possible without the help of many people. We would like to thank them for their tremendous efforts. We would like to thank all authors of the book chapters for their high quality contributions to this book. We would also like to thank our book chapter reviewers for their hard work in providing professional reviews to all the book chapters, which helped improve the quality of all book chapters significantly. We are very grateful to the people at Morgan Kaufmann for their hard work and continuous help and assistance throughout the book-editing process.

January 2017

Part 1

Modeling and Searching

Outline

Chapter 1. Ontologies and context modeling for the Web of Things

Chapter 2. The Anatomy of An Intent Based Search and Crawler Engine for the Web of Things

Chapter 3. Modeling RESTful Web of Things Services

Chapter 4. A Semantic-Rich Approach to IoT Using the Generalized World Entities Paradigm

Chapter 1

Ontologies and context modeling for the Web of Things

Suparna De; Yuchao Zhou; Klaus Moessner    Institute for Communication Systems (ICS), Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Surrey, Surrey, United Kingdom

Abstract

The Web of Things (WoT) paradigm enables access to physical world things and their data through standard Web protocols. This provides interoperability at the hardware and communication protocol level, but does not add intelligence to the things or facilitate unambiguous interpretation of their data. The evolution of the WoT towards the semantic WoT offers the promise of meeting the interoperability challenge through the use of semantic Web technologies. The W3C Web of Things initiative encourages the use of common vocabularies to ensure interoperability and a common understanding of the domain knowledge. Ontologies provide a structured, common formalism to the disparate elements of the WoT and can form the basis of a common knowledge base. The research community and standardisation bodies have developed numerous ontologies describing the elements of the WoT and associated domains. A comprehensive review of the various proposed ontologies is needed to facilitate the adoption and reuse of the available models. This survey reviews the current state-of-the-art in WoT ontologies, which are presented from two perspectives: cross-domain ontologies which are classified into device, service, data and localisation models, and domain ontologies, which are presented from an environmental and user-oriented perspective.

Keywords

Ontology; Web of Things; Context modeling survey; Device and service ontology; Smart home model; Smart city

Chapter points

• This chapter presents a taxonomy and survey of the current state-of-the-art in WoT ontologies.

• The developed taxonomy considers the ontologies in a two-layered approach: cross-domain that include models of WoT elements, such as device, entity, service, location and domain models that represent WoT application areas, classified into environmental and user-oriented areas.

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the collaborative European Union and Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication (MIC), Japan, Research and Innovation action, iKaaS under EU Grant number 643262. The first author also acknowledges funding support from the TagItSmart! collaborative project supported by the European Horizon 2020 programme, contract number: 688061.

1.1 Introduction

The Internet of Things (IoT) is envisaged to impact significantly the lives of citizens and offer new business opportunities through digital innovation in the integration of the physical and digital worlds. The first step in the IoT vision has been interconnectivity between physical world objects. The main drivers for further IoT development are enabling things-to-things communications and integration of things data with applications to lead the way towards context-aware solutions and smart cyber-physical systems. This has led to the next step of connecting things to the Web; leading to the emergence of the Web of Things (WoT). The WoT principles are not limited to Web access, but extend to "Web Linking for resource description and discovery, resource directories and security" [29], through Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) protocols such as Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) [52] and lightweight HTTP implementations. The WoT enables interaction of things and systems through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) exposing things data and metadata. However, true integration is hampered by the fact that "many devices do not speak the same language and cannot exchange data across different gateways and smart hubs [53]. To illustrate, the data generated by things about their ambient environment may have a defined structure in a known format (e.g. JSON/CSV/XML), but the data models and schemas adopted are different and not always compatible. Additionally, they may be represented in different units and include additional information. This leads us to the ‘interoperability’ challenge, which has been recognised by industry alliance bodies such as the Alliance for Internet of Things Innovation (AIOTI)¹ and in the European IoT research roadmap [61] as key to achieving convergence in the long term" [53]. Recent research has led to the unanimous conclusion that semantic technologies can be the driver for integration and interoperability [66,29,39], by enabling the semantic annotation of IoT devices and data. This has been termed as the progression towards a semantic Web of Things (SWoT) in the literature [29], as the basis for achieving a common understanding of the various entities forming part of the IoT. This evolution is recognised as a seamless extension of the IoT towards achieving wide-scale interoperability and a move towards horizontal open systems and platforms that can support multiple applications. A recent report [6] on interoperability for the WoT, by industry and standards experts, highlights the role of semantic interoperability to unlock value across the different domains (such as cities, factories, retail environments etc.) of the WoT.

Specifically, the use of semantic Web-based modelling techniques (RDF models and OWL ontologies) can enable a homogeneous and scalable means to access WoT information. Ontologies can capture the various facets in a common, formalised structure as well as the inter-relationships between the things to form the domain knowledge of the WoT. Semantic interoperability can enable the use of things/objects and data across application domains as well as data exchange across the value chain [53]. However, given the massive scale of the things involved in the IoT, the "creation of a unitary ontology to define all the resources and manage all the aspects related to them seems to be impossible" [39]. The semantic annotations need to capture the capabilities of the heterogeneous objects forming part of the WoT in order to enable their search and discovery, the location of these objects (as part of a set of context features) as well as the information they can provide [61]. This leads to the need for domain specific ontologies. Practitioners also need knowledge of the existence of the various domain specific ontologies and an assessment of the applicability of these towards applications such as search and discovery, data analytics and data fusion in different domains such as smart cities, assisted living, home automation etc. Thus, it becomes quite important to have a clear framework in place that facilitates a clear use of the different available ontologies from a data and context-awareness perspective. In addition to the four ontology design principles of lightweight-ness, completeness, compatibility and modularity as identified in [67], various requirements for the elements to be modelled by WoT specific ontologies have been identified [39,72,29,67]:

• WoT ontologies need to address the representation of not only the thing specific (such as sensors, devices, actuators, smart objects) heterogeneity of the WoT with the necessary level of abstraction, but also capture the distributed environment context in which they operate.

• Since WoT smart objects provide services individually or in cooperation, this also needs to be taken into account.

• The data generated by smart objects needs to be precisely and effectively modelled so that it can be represented, reasoned upon and used to drive higher-level processes such as data manipulation and fusion.

• The semantic representations should facilitate extensible annotations, i.e. from minimal to elaborate descriptions.

• With WoT objects typically being energy-constrained and operating in dynamic environments, capturing the notion of quality of the available services and generated data assumes importance.

• With mobile objects increasingly contributing as data sensors in the WoT, associating the generated data with the location of sensing and the object identity becomes crucial so that the data can be corroborated and combined to generate knowledge about the ambient environment state.

A number of ontologies and context models have been proposed by the research community addressing different parts of the above requirements, leading to a substantive body of ontological models that can be candidates for a wide variety of WoT applications. A survey and analysis of current ontologies is presented in this book chapter. Additionally, we will focus on a definition of a taxonomy to capture the various elements of the WoT as modelled by the various available ontologies. An analysis of the available ontological models in terms of different facets and domain applicability will also be presented through a mix of comparison measures.

The remainder of this chapter is organised as follows: based on the requirements identified above, we developed the taxonomy for the survey of ontology modelling efforts in the WoT in Section 1.2, along with a number of measures for comparing the surveyed ontologies. Sections 1.3–1.4 detail the specific approaches from existing state of the art that propose ontologies that fit into the defined classification model. Where applicable, the ontologies are described in the context of the European research projects within which they were defined. A discussion of the findings and future outlook is presented in Section 1.5, before providing concluding remarks in Section 1.6.

1.2 Taxonomy and Comparison Framework

Existing studies surveying WoT ontologies include a survey of existing IoT ontologies and vocabularies along five identified conceptual groups [36] of sensors/actuators; global and local coordinates; communication endpoint; observations, features of interest, units and dimensions; and vendor, version, deployment time. The authors only aim at identifying ontologies that can be used to semantically describe a specific set of real world devices that include a weather station, fan and an electric meter, with the service perspective notably missing as well as ontologies capturing data. Prominent device/sensor, data and service ontologies are listed in [39], whereas [25] discusses ontologies proposed for describing sensors and those covering WoT domains such as smart cities, ambient assisted living (AAL) and generally cyber-physical systems. A review of some of the existing ontology models and their comparison along the aspects of dynamics, concepts modelled, scale and mobility is presented in [70]. However, these approaches are limited by the absence of a classification and comparison scheme and a comprehensive listing of available WoT ontologies. The taxonomy proposed in this book chapter extends the ontology categories outlined in [39], while taking cognizance of the features commented upon in [70].

Existing research on ontologies for the WoT defines models for the various entities forming part of the WoT, viz. devices, services, sensors etc. either in isolation or as part of an interconnected suite of ontologies. In addition, there are ontologies that cover the allied context representation tasks. The taxonomy developed in this chapter considers a two layered approach: cross-domain and domain-specific ontologies, as shown in Fig. 1.1. A similar demarcation is also outlined in the WoT semantic interoperability report [6]. The cross-domain ontologies consist of WoT concepts that are shared across the domains and vertical application silos. These include the core WoT elements as identified in the literature, including things, sensors, services etc. as well as shared concepts related to quantities, units and location. The domain ontologies, on the other hand, relate to specific application domains, such as smart home, ambient assisted living (AAL), etc. and often reference the cross domain ontologies. Moreover, the cross domain ontologies are classified into four perspectives: (1) device models, including smart object or resource models and more specific sensor ontologies, (2) service ontologies, that cover the provision of WoT device functionalities as services, (3) data ontologies, that represent the semantic annotation of both instantaneous and streaming data and (4) localisation ontologies, that capture both indoor and outdoor locations, such as geographical features. The domain ontologies provide the context to the cross domain models. These are classified according to two main perspectives: (1) environment models, that cover home/office/public buildings environment and the agriculture domain and (2) user-oriented ontologies, focussing on user activity recognition, ambient intelligence and WoT-enabled learning scenarios. The developed taxonomy is presented in Fig. 1.2.

Figure 1.1 Multi-layered perspective of WoT ontologies

Figure 1.2 Classification of the WoT ontologies

To gain a quick while in-depth overview of the various models, we define a number of dimensions against which the existing works can be compared. These are explained as follows:

• Modelled concepts: indicates the elements modelled in the ontology

• Language: specifies the modelling language formalism, e.g. RDF, OWL

• Links to domain ontologies: refers to possible ontology relationships that link to existing third-party ontologies covering different domains such as location, units of measurement for data etc. Referring to existing domain ontologies offers the possibility of having more interconnected device descriptions, by forming Linked Data [8] and thereby contributing to the Web of Data vision

• Notion of quality: with increasing number of mobile sensing units contributing to the data pool of the WoT, including Quality of Service (QoS) and QoI (Quality of Information) attributes in the semantic annotations can help applications to discriminate between WoT services offering similar functionalities

• Application domain: indicates the application domain to which the ontology instantiations have been applied. These may be generic applications such as for sensor search and discovery or refer to the IoT application areas as identified in [62], such as smart health, smart living, smart manufacturing etc.

• Prototype/tool: refers to any applicable proof-of-concept software which makes use of the ontology instantiations

Table 1.1 provides a summary of the surveyed works against the comparison dimensions outlined above. It is evident that most existing approaches define a suite of inter-linked ontologies covering a combination of the device, service and data aspects along with possibly the physical locations that the device inhabits.

Table 1.1

Comparison of WoT Cross-Domain and Domain Ontologies

a http://www.semsorgrid4env.eu/.

b https://sonet.ecoinformatics.org/semtools-svn/ontologies.

c https://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/SWEET.

d https://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/PATO.

e http://www.tifn.nl.

1.3 Cross Domain Models

1.3.1 Device Ontologies

Most of the ontologies in the WoT are drawn from early efforts in the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) area to model sensors and actuators. However, recently, efforts have been made to extend the semantic efforts to model WoT-specific elements, including things and the functionalities they provide. Since sensors still represent a sizeable section of the things in the WoT, the semantic modelling efforts for them are presented in a separate section.

1.3.1.1 WoT Smart Object Ontologies

With the IoT domain providing the possibility of everyday objects providing real world data to the Internet, the associated models should include metadata describing the objects to provide context to the descriptions.

One of the first EU research initiatives in the IoT area, the IoT-A project,² defined the IoT domain model [7], identifying the main concepts of the IoT and the inter-relationships between them. A semantic model [20] for entities, resources and services was also proposed, with resources forming the software representation of device functionalities. The focus of interactions by human users or software agents was identified to be the ‘entity’. An entity is modeled to have attributes that tie it to the domain (i.e. observable or actionable features), location attributes as well as type and identifier specifications. Also captured are optional temporal features and links to known vocabularies for specifying ownership. The resources provide some form of physical access to the entity. The resource model specifies resource types (e.g. sensor/actuator/gateway node), the location of the corresponding device as well as a link to the service model that exposes the resource capabilities. The location can be defined in terms of the geographical coordinates, to an external ontology instance such as that in GeoNames³ or through an URI to a local location ontology, such as that which provides detailed location description of rooms and buildings in a campus [18]. A simplified version of the resource model proposed in [20] is shown in Fig. 1.3.

Figure 1.3 IoT-A Resource Model, see De et al. [20]

A similar device and entity model is proposed in [32] and in [15] with resources identified as the computational element of a device and categorised as on-device or network resource to represent events in an IoT environment.

A domain independent ontology from the oneM2M standards initiative is the oneM2M Base ontology [42], shown in Fig. 1.4, that features a Thing as its root concept. A root class thing represents an entity in the oneM2M system, and its refinement, the Device class represents a thing which can interact electronically with the environment. A device has 1 or more functionalities (i.e. capabilities) which are exposed to the network through services. The functionality may in turn relate to actuation on the environment (controllingFunctionality) or sensing real world aspects (measuringFunctionality).

Figure 1.4 Main concepts in oneM2M Base ontology, derived from oneM2M technical specification TS-0012 [42]

In contrast to the entity-resource modelling constructs reviewed above, Zhu et al. [74] define a PT-SOA ontology for physical things (PTs) and services in the cyber-physical domain, where they model the PTs as providers (and recipients) of services. The PT ontology has 4 classes: physical profile to depict the things physical properties, any constituent PT and components; operation profile to specify the resources required for its operation, control mechanisms, maintenance and physical constraints when providing services; context to depict the dynamic state of the PT and the scheduled service specification for scheduling the PT to serve multiple requests to its provided services.

The EU ICT-FP7 project iCore⁴ defined the concept of a Virtual Object (VO) as the virtual representation of a real world object, such as sensors, devices, or everyday objects, in order to abstract the technical heterogeneity of the possible objects in the IoT. The VO model was defined [34] to support the cognitive management of virtual objects. Each VO concept in the model represents an Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) object, which in turn is associated to a non-ICT object. The model also specifies the VO function in terms of locations and functions of the ICT object. The functions of ICT objects are further expressed as Input, Output, Cost, and Utility. Output is also bound with OutputMetadata to describe its data. A similar VO concept is also outlined by Christophe et al. [14] who present a semantic model for representing virtual objects, to define the structure and capabilities of objects. The model reuses FOAF vocabulary to indicate the owner of objects, and links to the GeoNames ontology to show the location of the corresponding smart space. A simplified version of the iCore VO ontology was adopted in [71], focussing on the data provisioning capabilities of a VO. The VO concept was used to represent different sensing objects, including those with no fixed locations (e.g. sensors mounted on public transport). The VO metadata proposed in this work includes the VO ID, name, type, a Boolean property indicating if the underlying real world object is mobile and the location, expressed in terms of a WGS84 modelled latitude, longitude and a geohash⁵ value.

1.3.1.2 Sensor Ontologies

Early modelling efforts for sensor and actuator networks were driven by the Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) initiative [10] of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) which defined a set of XML schemas and standards aimed at discovering Web accessible sensor networks and archived data. The widely accepted sensor ontology, which builds upon the SWE initiatives, is the SSN ontology [16] from the W3Cs Incubator Group on Semantic Sensor Networks⁶ to describe sensors and sensor networks. The SSN ontology describes sensors from a number of perspectives [26], including those representing: a) Sensor: definition of a sensor, to include anything that can estimate or calculate the value of a phenomenon, the sensing procedure and what is being sensed, b) System: to model systems of sensors and their deployment, c) Feature: the property being sensed and, d) Observation: observation values and their metadata. The different modules of the SSN ontology are shown in Fig. 1.5. The SSN ontology, however, does not include modelling aspects for features of interest, units of measurement and domain knowledge that are related to sensor data and need to be associated with the observed data to support autonomous data communications and efficient reasoning and decision making processes. Extensions to other components in the IoT domain are not specified in the ontology.

Figure 1.5 The SSN ontology and conceptual modules, see W3C SSN-XG report [69]

The CSIRO sensor ontology [41] was the precursor of the W3C SSN sensor ontology. It provides a semantic description of sensors in terms of the sensor grounding (platform, dimensions, calibration, power-source and access mechanism) and operation specification (operation, process and results). Concepts for sensor measurements are not part of the ontology. Moreover, similar to the SSN ontology, concepts for domain knowledge, units of measurement, location etc. are not included. Thus, more modelling concepts are needed to link the sensor descriptions to sensor measurements and then to the real-world objects in the WoT domain. Previous sensor description models include OntoSensor [50] which constructs an ontology-based descriptive specification model for sensors by excerpting parts of SensorML [11] descriptions and extending the IEEE Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO).⁷ However, it does not provide a descriptive model for observation and measurement data.

In contrast to generic thing or device ontologies which may be applied to sensor or actuator instantiations, a number of recent research initiatives have specifically looked at modelling actuators and their functionalities by extending the SSN ontology. The Semantic Actuator Network (SAN) ontology [56] proposes the Actuator-Stimulus-Operation modelling pattern as analogous to the Sensor-Stimulus-Operation pattern of the SSN ontology. According to this model, an actuator is an object that modifies an environment property by producing a stimulus. The Operation concept describes the dynamic description of an actuator by defining the actuator operation that modifies the property of a specific feature of interest. The feature and property perspective are the same as in the SSN ontology, with the only change being that features and properties are ‘changed by actuators instead of being’ sensed.

A simplified actuator ontology for home care systems has been proposed by Wang et al. [64] where an actuator is modelled as a refinement of a Device and provides a Service. A service in turn supports a number of Operations which have zero or more Parameters. The Actuator class is further sub-classed into concepts suited to the home domain, such as Alarm, DVDPlayer, Light, MobilePhone, and TV.

The wide adoption of the SSN ontology and its extensions as well as the possibility of semantic annotation of generic objects through the available ontologies can lay credence to the claim that "the solutions for the representation of ‘things’ have reached a mature stage" [26]. However, to address the heterogeneity of the functionalities provided by the things, a higher abstraction level is required. This is typically achieved through services, as detailed in the next section.

1.3.2 Service Ontologies

To facilitate the development of large-scale, loosely coupled WoT applications, researchers have been applying service-oriented principles to decouple the sensing/actuating functionalities of the WoT things and their hosts. The main tenet has been to abstract the things functionalities and capabilities in terms of standard service interfaces to support uniform service operations.

1.3.2.1 OWL-S Based Ontologies

The semantic annotation methodology of Web Services has been adopted in the WoT domain by researchers to expose services offered by the smart objects. The modelled services provide functionalities to provide information about entities they are associated with or to manipulate the physical properties of the related entities or their surrounding environment. The OWL-S model for SOAP/WSDL services is based on the Profile-Process-Grounding pattern and much of the complexity stems from the process modelling. Semantic modelling efforts in the WoT area apply a modified version of the OWL-S modelling constructs, which is referred to as the profile-model-grounding design pattern, where the profile and grounding are adapted from OWL-S and refined to fit RESTful services and the model excludes process modelling and is based on the atomic service modelling in OWL-S and RESTful service modelling in hREST. The service profile represents the non-functional aspects of the service; what the service is. The service model defines the functional aspects of the service to describe its behaviour and the grounding describes the access details of the service.

The IoT-A project applied the OWL-S principles to service modelling as part of their entity-resource-service ontology suite. The service model [20] represents the functionalities provided by the resource in terms of the IOPE (input, output, precondition, effect) terms. The input and output types are detailed by linking to defined concepts in the QU ontologies.⁸ The service model also specifies the service area (i.e. the observed area for ‘sensing services’ and the operation area for ‘actuating services’) and the service schedule (to specify time constraints on service availability).

Similar service ontology models have been proposed in [32] and applied to calculating service cost for service selection and in [15] for identifying service related events in IoT environments.

The IoT.est project⁹ focussed on the senor-as-a-service paradigm [44] and proposed a semantic IoT service description model for knowledge representation [67]. The design aims to balance the trade-off between being lightweight and completeness in addition to focussing on modularity. They adopt the design pattern of [18] for modelling in the WoT domain, and provide a service model which can be accessed through SOAP/WSDL and RESTful services. The service model applies the OWL-S [40] principles to define a service profile which includes the service name, category, QoS and location; a service model which defines the operations allowed on the service; and the grounding which describes the interaction elements, (e.g. endpoint addresses and communication protocols), and captures the RESTful resources (e.g. Input/Output parameters and the corresponding access URLs). Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Information (QoI), are also modelled, including relationships that link to the ‘service’ class. The defined ontology also incorporates test features to enable automated test case creation and execution. The designed test model enables model-based testing of IoT service capabilities and automated test data creation. The various modules of the service ontology are shown in Fig. 1.6.

Figure 1.6 IoT.est service description ontology modules, see Wang et al. [67]

The OWL-S specification also forms the basis of the dynamic service ontology proposed in [45] to model transactions in the IoT domain. The service profile element of OWL-S is expanded with a ServiceStatus class to describe the current status of entity services. The ServiceStatus class is defined in terms of a name (as string), location (as latitude, longitude or other physical locations), current status (which can take 3 values: atomic, composite or simple status), complicating count (representing the number of concurrent services) and waiting sequence (representing the transactions waiting on the entity). The ServiceStatus class instance values support the selection, combination and control of entity services.

The semantic information model in the ForwarDS-IoT discovery service [24] also applies the profile-model-grounding pattern of OWL-S to describe services. The Service class is linked to both the Sensor and Actuator classes in the information model through the exposes property.

In contrast to the above approaches, the PT-SOA ontology model [74] applies the OWL-S constructs of process-profile-grounding as is. The Service class is linked to a PT instance through the providedBy and appliedTo properties, as a service is provided by a physical thing and may also be applied to, i.e. influence, another thing. The conventional OWL-S ontology is extended with the context precondition and context effect classes to specify the dynamic requirements and subsequent effects of each service of a PT.

1.3.2.2 Other Service Ontologies

Thoma et al. [60] outline a service description for sensor node services in an RDF version of USDL (Unified Service Description Language). The main focus of the semantic annotation of sensor nodes and network services is their integration with enterprise IT systems. The description model specifies the interaction protocol (including input and output parameters), the service model, provider details, links to the service executable, legal conditions and the service providing business entity. The Semantic Service Description (SSD) ontology [28] aims to support the translation of platform-specific configuration into semantic metadata to achieve interoperability between services offered by physical objects and deployment platforms. The proposed ontology has a main concept of ServiceObject which is defined in terms of 3 main classes: Property, Capability and Server Profile. Each class property value is defined as a key-value pair. The Property class describes the static properties of the underlying object, the capability class describes the data provided by the service in terms of its name, data type, data unit and condition. The server profile contains classes and properties describing the server name, URL and the available server actions such as deploy, uninstall and update. Each action comprises of HTTP methods such as GET, POST, PUT, UPDATE, user request destination, HTTP header and content.

The work presented in [35] proposes an ontology-based model for service oriented sensor data and networks. The ontology consists of three main classes: ServiceProperty, LocationProperty, and PhysicalProperty. ServiceProperty explains the functionality of a service, while properties in the other two components describe contextual and physical characteristics of the sensor nodes in wireless sensor network architecture. The system, however, does not specify how sensor data will be described and interpreted in a sensor network application.

The service ontology defined as part of the IoT-based service integration ontology (IIO) [51] represents services in a smart city. It is represented in terms of a Topic, defined by developers and used to distinguish between service offerings in the city. The service class is further defined in terms of the Method concept (Create, Read, Update, Delete methods) to reference WoT resources, URLs and repositories to reference the service platform, and links to the User class.

1.3.3 Data Ontologies

As the next step to the semantic modelling of the physical objects of the WoT and their capabilities exposed as services, it is necessary to review the information available from such resources, either as a result from their interactions or from the observation of the ambient environment. Data ontologies in the WoT mainly describe Observation and Measurement (O&M) data, mostly focusing on how data is generated, what the data is and what real world phenomena or features may be related to the data. In addition, metadata on when and where the data is generated is usually included. This section presents both data ontologies designed for annotating instantaneous and streaming O&M data.

1.3.3.1 Observation and Measurement Data