Smart objects: Challenges for Semantic Web research

The increased availability and robustness of sensors, the wide-spread use of the internet as a communication environment and the intensified adoption of semantic technologies foster the vision of embedding intelligence in physical objects. The race of realizing this vision is pervasive to a variety of research fields, most notably ambient intelligence and semantic web, and leads to the proliferation of several overlapping definitions and terminologies: smart products, semantic devices, semantic gadgets - to which we collectively refer to as smart objects. What exactly are smart objects? And what are the research challenges in realizing them? We hereby explore the answers to these questions. Part of the work reported in this paper has been performed by the author in the context of the FP7 SmartProducts project (231204) while working at the Knowledge Media Institute(KMi), The Open University, UK.