The Internet of Things

7Data Representation and Reasoning

Maria Maleshkova¹ and Nicolas Seydoux²

¹Computer Science Institute, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany

²Departments of SARA and MELODI, LAAS‐CNRS, CNRS, INSA, IRIT, University of Toulouse, Toulouse, France

7.1 Introduction

Knowledge about a domain can be represented in many forms. As humans, we typically use natural language representation, i.e. text, to describe things that we know. Natural language is unstructured and thus challenging for machines to process. Various structured knowledge representation approaches have emerged over time that are more structured and can be processed by machines. As described in this chapter, semantic technologies represent a promising approach to structured knowledge representation and reasoning. From a knowledge representation point of view, Internet of Things (IoT) is confronted with two main challenges associated with the use of data produced by interconnected Things – interoperability and integration.

The vision of the IoT is to leverage Internet standards in order to interconnect all types of embedded devices such as patient monitors, medical sensors, congestion monitoring devices, traffic‐light controls, temperature sensors and smart meters. As exemplified in Chapters 11 to 14, the potential new business use cases as well as improvements in existing business processes and applications that employ IoT are almost limitless. Even though real‐life objects can finally participate in integrated scenarios, the use ...