A Sustainable Solution for IoT Semantic Interoperability: Dataspaces Model via Distributed Approaches

Abstract

In the past few decades, the prevalence of Internet of Things (IoT) applications has brought both opportunities and challenges of different categories. One of the main concerns nowadays is semantic interoperability. Although plenty of augmented ontologies and resource description frameworks have been designed to achieve semantic interoperation, there is still no sustainable solution to interconnect the increasing number of heterogeneous devices and corresponding data. Aiming at this problem, this article presents a dataspaces model utilizing distributed approaches to represent semantic information as a sustainable solution for IoT semantic interoperability. In this model, an attention-based entity embedding approach is designed to convert IoT entities into low-dimensional dense vectors, then calculations, including entities, relations, etc., can be further conducted. Consequently, the entity embeddings could reflect the semantic information of Class equivalences among entities. To recognize entity relations, the generated entity vectors and the arithmetic results of two entities are combined as input features. By feeding the input features to a well-trained Tensor-train modified DNN, the relation between two entities could be recognized. Finally, experiments are conducted on two data sets to evaluate the proposed approaches. Results indicate that the generated entity vectors could effectively reflect the semantic similarity between entities. More importantly, while achieving parameter compression and better generalizing ability, the relation recognition approach improves the relation recognition accuracy on new entities compared with the state-of-art models.