Semantic Interoperability for IoT Platforms in Support of Decision Making: An Experiment on Early Wildfire Detection

One of the main obstacles towards the promotion of IoT adoption and innovation is data interoperability. Facilitating cross-domain interoperability is expected to be the core element for the realisation of the next generation of the IoT computing paradigm that is already taking shape under the name of Internet of Everything (IoE). In this article, an analysis of the current status on IoT semantic interoperability is presented that leads to the identification of a set of generic requirements that act as fundamental design principles for the specification of interoperability enabling solutions. In addition, an extension of NGSIv2 data model and API (de-facto) standards is proposed aiming to bridge the gap among IoT and social media and hence to integrate user communities with cyber-physical systems. These specifications have been utilised for the implementation of the IoT2Edge interoperability enabling mechanism which is evaluated within the context of a catastrophic wildfire incident that took place in Greece on July 2018. Weather data, social media activity, video recordings from the fire, sensor measurements and satellite data, linked to the location and the time of this fire incident have been collected, modeled in a uniform manner and fed to an early fire detection decision support system. The findings of the experiment certify that achieving minimum data interoperability with light-weight, plug-n-play mechanisms can be realised with significant benefits for our society.