A Survey of the Semantic Specification of Sensors

Abstract. Semantic sensor networks use declarative descriptions of sen-sors promote reuse and integration, and to help solve the difficulties of installing, querying and maintaining complex, heterogeneous sensor net-works. This paper reviews the state of the art for the semantic specifi-cation of sensors, one of the fundamental technologies in the semantic sensor network vision. Twelve sensor ontologies are reviewed and anal-ysed for the range and expressive power of their concepts. The reasoning and search technology developed in conjunction with these ontologies is also reviewed, as is technology for annotating OGC standards with links to ontologies. Sensor concepts that cannot be expressed accurately by current sensor ontologies are also discussed.