Enhancing IoT Data and Semantic Interoperability Based on Entity Tree Embedding Under an Edge–Cloud Framework

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) devices and services have become increasingly ubiquitous in recent years as they greatly facilitate our daily life. To promote IoT data and semantic interoperability, we propose an edge–cloud framework. The edge end is responsible for handling customized data processing tasks and transferring the processed data, while the cloud end deals with semantic information processing. Additionally, we present an entity tree embedding algorithm at the cloud end to convert IoT entities and attributes into embedding vectors in a tree-structured way. Consequently, entity embeddings could reflect the semantic information at both Class and Property levels, which ameliorates our previous entity embedding method, leading to better embedding results and clustering effects. Finally, the entity tree embedding algorithm and the corresponding compression algorithm are evaluated. Results indicate that the Whitening algorithm is the best method to compress embedding vectors. More importantly, the entity tree embedding algorithm captures both the semantic and structural information of entities and attributes. Additionally, the clustering experiments show that the proposed embedding algorithm achieves better clustering results compared with the original entity embeddings and the uncompressed averaging method.