Semantic reasoning for context-aware internet of things applications

Abstract

Acquiring knowledge from continuous and heterogeneous data streams is a prerequisite for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Semantic technologies provide comprehensive tools and applicable methods for representing, integrating, and acquiring knowledge. However, resource-constraints, dynamics, mobility, scalability, and real-time requirements introduce challenges for applying these methods in IoT environments. We study how to utilize semantic IoT data for reasoning of actionable knowledge by applying state-of-the-art semantic technologies. For performing these studies, we have developed a semantic reasoning system operating in a realistic IoT environment. We evaluate the scalability of different reasoning approaches, including a single reasoner, distributed reasoners, mobile reasoners, and a hybrid of them. We evaluate latencies of reasoning introduced by different semantic data formats. We verify the capabilities of promising semantic technologies for IoT applications through comparing the scalability and real-time response of different reasoning approaches with various semantic data formats. Moreover, we evaluate different data aggregation strategies for integrating distributed IoT data for reasoning processes.