Towards Collaborative Sensing using Dynamic Intelligent Virtual Sensors

The recent advent of ‘Internet of Things’ technologies is set to bring about a plethora of heterogeneous data sources to our immediate environment. In this work, we put forward a novel concept of dynamic intelligent virtual sensors (DIVS) in order to support the creation of services designed to tackle complex problems based on reasoning about various types of data. While in most of works presented in the literature virtual sensors are concerned with homogeneous data and/or static aggregation of data sources, we define DIVS to integrate heterogeneous and distributed sensors in a dynamic manner. This paper illustrates how to design and build such systems based on a smart building case study. Moreover, we propose a versatile framework that supports collaboration between DIVS, via a semantics-empowered search heuristic, aimed towards improving their performance.