From implicit semantics towards ontologies — practical considerations from the INTER-IoT perspective

From the general SOA architectural pattern, through distributed computing based on Grids and Clouds, to the Internet of Things, the idea of collaboration between software entities, independent from their vendors and technologies, attracts much attention. This brings about a question: how to achieve interoperability among multiple (existing and upcoming) platforms/systems/applications. The context for the presented research is provided by the INTER-IoT project, which deals with different aspects of interoperability in the Internet of Things (IoT). It aims at the design and implementation of an open framework and associated methodology to provide interoperability among heterogeneous IoT platforms, across a software stack (devices, network, middleware, application services, data and semantics). We focus on the data and semantics layer. Specifically, the role of ontologies and semantic data processing, as means of achieving interoperability. However, since the vision of the Semantic Web remains mostly unfulfilled, semantics remains implicitly “hidden” data and in exchanged messages. Therefore, we are particularly interested in establishing what methods and tools exist to create OWL ontologies from implicitly expressed semantics. We focus on popular data formats i.e. XML, JSON, RDF, Relational Databases and NoSQL Databases.