Enabling Semantic Discovery in the Swarm

Abstract

Given the large amount of devices in the Internet of Things (IoT), a major challenge is to efficiently find services that meet specific requirements. The proliferation of standards and protocols precludes the existence of a common nomenclature to describe IoT devices, and hence hinders device interoperability. In the previous work, we had proposed the Swarm, a framework to create a common interface for IoT devices. The Swarm provides a software agent to facilitate the decentralized communication and interaction of devices, constituting a step toward interoperability in the IoT. Semantic technologies have been successfully used for service discovery in business applications, and more recently are being used to solve interoperability problems in the IoT. This paper aims to propose a framework to enable semantic discovery in the Swarm. We provide an architecture and describe a reference implementation, based on open Web technologies. We also provide a method to validate our results and propose future directions of this paper.