Using explicit semantic representations for user programming of sensor devices

As the demand for environmental sensing grows, there is an urgent need to improve access to observation data collected by sensor systems. However, sensing devices and the platforms on which they are deployed are highly heterogeneous in their capabilities as well as in their method for control and for retrieval of observation data. In this paper we propose to employ semantic technologies, in particular descriptions in the OWL-DL ontology language coupled with ontology editors and reasoners to control the heterogeneity. Through a case study developed for a programmable automatic weather station, we show how an ontological concept description can be translated to an active query or command to a sensor device, coupling interpretation of a declarative ontology with device-specific wrapper code. Our method relies on a single extensible ontological model to describe the capability of sensor devices, and thereby support their discovery, and also to support their programming. This manages the heterogeneity to enable widespread access to sensor programming languages by naive users.