Managing Things and Services with Semantics

This paper presents a survey on the usage, oppor- tunities and pitfalls of semantic technologies in the Internet of Things. The survey was conducted in the context of a semantic enterprise integration platform. In total we surveyed sixty-one individuals from industry and academia on their views and current usage of IoT technologies in general, and semantic technologies in particular. The semantic enterprise integration platform aims for interoperability at a service level, as well as at a protocol level. Therefore, also questions regarding the use of application layer protocols, network layer protocols and management protocols were integrated into the survey. The survey suggests that there is still a lot of heterogeneity in IoT technologies, but first indications of the use of standardized protocols exist. Semantic technologies are being recognized as of potential use, mainly in the management of things and services. Nonetheless, the participants still see many obstacles which hinder the widespread use of semantic technologies: Firstly, a lack of training as traditional embedded programmers are not well aware of semantic technologies. Secondly, a lack of stan- dardization in ontologies, which would enable interoperability and thirdly, a lack of good tooling support. I. INTRODUCTION Research on semantics and semantic management of Inter- net of Things systems has attracted a lot of interest in the last ten years, but so far, has failed to gain widespread use in industrial applications. From an European research point of view (but not limited to that) a lot of resources, both in manpower as well as in financial support, has gone into semantic research. Most projects that have been ramped up in past five years in the context of Future Internet (1), Internet of Things (2) or Industry 4.0 (3) use semantic technologies in one way or the other. Just to name a few, the SENSEI project (4) for example, was funded with e14.9 million. The more recent Internet-of-Things Architecture project (IOT-A) (5), which is considered as an EU flagship project, received around e11.9 million. More semantic IoT-related projects will start as part of HORIZON 2020. So there is definitely a lot of research being conducted, but when looking into commercialized products it is obvious that semantic technologies in IoT so far failed to deliver on its promise. Semantic technologies still are not of wide-spread use in real-world applications. In this work, we first present our vision of a semantic management of things, services and devices. We then continue with presenting a recent study on semantics in Internet-of- Things applications, that was mainly conducted to gain insight into potential further usage cases of this platform and further development options. Our work on linked services motivated surveying transport and application layer protocols, which otherwise is not much connected with semantic technologies. While the main focus of the survey was to get a feeling about the view of the community on semantics, it also revealed some interesting insights about application level protocols, transport level protocols and network management which is of interest for a broader audience. II. MANAGING ENTITIES AND SERVICES A. Introduction