W3C is pleased to receive the IoT-Lite Ontology submission from the University of Surrey and the Australian National University. The IoT-Lite ontology provides a lightweight ontology to represent Internet of Things (IoT) resources, entities and services. The IoT-Lite ontology is a subset of the Semantic Sensor Network ontology as developed by the former W3C Semantic Sensor Network Incubator Group.
The IoT-Lite Ontology provides an extensible way to describe devices acting as sensors, actuators or tags in terms of their attributes and associated units of measure, as well as the device's physical location and area of coverage.
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Model Language (SensorML) provides standard models and an XML encoding for describing any process, including the process of measurement by sensors and instructions for deriving higher-level information from observations. The Sensor Markup Language (SenML) proposes a media type for representing simple sensor measurements and device parameters. The W3C Web of Things Interest Group is developing a service architecture for connected sensors and actuators. This provides a simple scripting model that is decoupled from the protocols, message formats and communication patterns for a distributed platform of platforms. This separation of architectural layers relies upon semantics and metadata.
The IoT-Lite ontology falls within the scope of the Spatial Data on the Web (SDW) Working Group, whose charter includes a work item to progress the Semantic Sensor Network ontology (SSN) to a W3C Recommendation. The IoT-Lite ontology is also of relevance to the W3C Web of Things Interest Group due to its interest in semantics and metadata for connected devices. Since the IoT-Lite ontology is a subset of the SSN ontology, one way forward would be for the IoT-Lite ontology to be specified as a profile of the SSN ontology in a W3C Note that is published jointly by the Spatial Data on the Web Working Group together with the Web of Things Interest Group.
Continuing discussion of this topic is welcome via the Spatial Data on the Web Working Group's public email list public-sdw-wg@w3.org [archive], and the W3C Web of Things Interest Group's public email list public-wot-ig@w3.org [archive].
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