ETH Zurich : Computer Science : Pervasive Computing : Distributed Systems : Education : Student Projects : Abstract

A Practical Approach to Web Semantics for M2M Communication (L)

Status: Abgeschlossen

Abstract—The Web of Things promotes the adoption of Web technology for the application layer of the Internet of Things. One aspect is transferring techniques from the Semantic Web: semantic descriptions and reasoners can help to implement smart objects that can autonomously achieve user-defined goals or provide self-configuration properties. This lab project aims at an architecture that enables Web semantics for constrained RESTful environments, which are implemented through the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP).

Background

The Semantic Web has been an ambitious plan to describe the world in a machine-readable form, so that computers can browse information and use services just like humans use Web pages. While open linked data already describes large parts of the world, there exist not that many se-mantic applications in practice. Recent efforts show that a bottom-up approach with a limited set of semantic descriptions for specific scenarios allows for practical solutions. A semantic reasoner can turn devices of the Internet of Things (IoT) into actual smart objects, as it can provide the necessary actions so that devices can automatically collaborate to achieve user goals. This Web of Things (WoT) approach is already attracting interest from industrial partners of our research group who aim at using bottom-up semantics within deployments.

Objectives

In this lab project, the Web-based reasoning approach will be combined with lightweight ma-chine-to-machine (M2M) communication based on CoAP and related specifications of the IETF CoRE working group. This will enable semantic reasoning for tiny, low-power devices, which are expected to represent the majority of IoT devices. The project will be driven by concrete application scenarios given by our partners from industry. While several building blocks of the envisioned system are already in place, for instance the semantic reasoner and a CoAP framework, the task is to design and implement an architecture that unites this powerful Semantic Web technology with low-power IoT solutions. The lab project is connected to an industry collaboration and the student is required to collaborate with the project workers. Thus, the student can conduct the lab project without a student partner.