Integrated semantics service platform for the Internet of Things: a case study of a smart office

The Internet of Things (IoT) allows machines and devices in the world to connect with each other and generate a huge amount of data, which has a great potential to provide useful knowledge across service domains. Combining the context of IoT with semantic technologies, we can build integrated semantic systems to support semantic interoperability. In this paper, we propose an integrated semantic service platform (ISSP) to support ontological models in various IoT-based service domains of a smart city. In particular, we address three main problems for providing integrated semantic services together with IoT systems: semantic discovery, dynamic semantic representation, and semantic data repository for IoT resources. To show the feasibility of the ISSP, we develop a prototype service for a smart office using the ISSP, which can provide a preset, personalized office environment by interpreting user text input via a smartphone. We also discuss a scenario to show how the ISSP-based method would help build a smart city, where services in each service domain can discover and exploit IoT resources that are wanted across domains. We expect that our method could eventually contribute to providing people in a smart city with more integrated, comprehensive services based on semantic interoperability.