SEMDPA: A Semantic Web Crossroad Architecture for WSNs in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) vision is to connect uniquely identifiable devices that surround us to the Internet, which is best described through ontologies. Thereby, new emerging technologies such as wireless sensor networks (WSN) are recognized as an essential enabling component of the IoT today. Hence, given the increasing interest to provide linked sensor data through the Web either following the Semantic Web Enablement (SWE) standard or the Linked Data approach, there is a need to also explore those data for potential hidden knowledge through data mining techniques utilized by a domain ontology. Following that rationale, a new lightweight IoT architecture SEMDPA has been developed. It supports linking sensors and other devices, as well as people via a single web by mean of a device-person-activity (DPA) crossroad ontology. The architecture is validated by mean of three rich-in-semantic services: contextual data mining over WSN, semantic WSN web enablement, and Linked WSN data. SEMDPA could be easily extensible to capture semantics of input sensor data from other domains as well.