An ontological approach for domain knowledge modeling and querying in wireless sensor networks

International audienceWireless sensor networks (WSNs) generate large volumes of raw data which increases the difficulty for applications to manage and query sensor data. WSNs are normally application specific with no sharing or reusability of sensor data among applications. In order for applications to be developed independently of particular WSNs, sensor data need to be enriched with semantic information. Ontologies are widely used as a means for solving the information heterogeneity problems because of their capability to provide explicit meaning to the information. This paper presents our work towards the development of a wireless sensor network ontology. Based on the proposed ontology we use the SPARQL query language to enable querying of sensor data. We present the description of the development of the proposed ontology, partial evaluation of the early prototype ontology, a discussion of design and implementation issues, and directions for future research works