The SSN Ontology of the Semantic Sensor Networks Incubator Group

The W3C Semantic Sensor Networks Incubator group (the SSN-XG), as one of its activities, produced an ontology to describe sensors and observations — the SSN ontology, available at http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ssnx/ssn. This article describes the development of the SSN ontology, the SSN ontology itself and its alignment to the DOLCE-UltraLite foundational ontology. The SSN ontology can describe the capabilities of sensors, the measurement processes used and the resultant observations.