Search

SAREF is an ontology created to enable interoperability between smart devices, but there is a lack in the literature of practical examples to implement SAREF in real applications. We validate the practical implementation of SAREF through two approaches. We first examine two methods to map the IoT data available in a smart home into linked data using SAREF: (1) by creating a template-based mapping to describe how SAREF can be used and (2) by using a mapping language to demonstrate it can be simple to map, while still using SAREF. The second approach demonstrates the communication capabilities of IoT devices when they share knowledge represented using SAREF and describes how SAREF enables interoperability between different devices. The two approaches demonstrate that all the information from various data sets of smart devices can successfully be transformed into the SAREF ontology and how SAREF can be applied in a concrete interoperability framework.

The IoT landscape is characterized by a fragmentation of standards, platforms and technologies, often scattered among different vertical domains. To prevent the market to continue to be fragmented and power-less, a protocol-independent semantic layer can serve as enabler of interoperability among the various smart devices from different manufacturers that co-exist in a specific industry domain, but also across different domains. To that end, the SAREF ontology was created in 2015 with the intention to interconnect data, enabling the communication between IoT devices that use different protocols and standards. A number of industrial sectors consequently expressed their interest to extend SAREF into their domains in order to fill the gaps of the semantics not yet covered by their communication protocols. Therefore, the SAREF4INMA ontology was recently created to extend SAREF for describing the Smart Industry & Manufacturing domain. SAREF4INMA is based on several standards and IoT initiatives, as well as on real use cases, and includes classes, properties and instances specifically created to cover the industry and manufacturing domain. This work describes the approach followed to develop this ontology, specifies its requirements and also includes a practical example of how to use it.