An ontology based context model for the discovery of IoT services in the Internet of Things

Abstract

The concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) aims at connecting physical objects to the internet and allows them to provide different services and to communicate among various objects. Within the IoT scope, the discovery of IoT services remains a challenge mainly because of the vast amount, mobility, heterogeneity, and wide distribution of services deployed in constrained devices. In fact, the context has a significant role to enable provision of adequate services to the users based on their surrounding environments. In addition, the context can help IoT services to adapt with the dynamic environment changes. In this paper, we aim to address how the context can be described for the IoT environments, and how it affects to the discovery of IoT services in the internet of things. For this reason, we propose an ontological based model for the IoT context, aiming at describing the different contexts of the main entities constituting the IoT environment. The proposed model is extensible, independent of domain and taking into account the constraints of the IoT like availability.