Semantic features for context organization

In recent years the technological world has grown by incorporating billions of small sensing devices, collecting and sharing real-world information. As the number of such devices grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage all these new information sources. There is no uniform way to share, process and understand context information. In previous publications we discussed efficient ways to organize context information that is independent of structure and representation. However, our previous solution suffers from semantic sensitivity. In this paper we review semantic methods that can be used to minimize this issue, and propose an unsupervised semantic similarity solution that combines distributional profiles with public web services. Our solution was evaluated against Miller-Charles dataset, achieving a correlation of 0.6.

On the application of contextual IoT service discovery in Information Centric Networks

The continuous flow of technological developments in communications and electronic industries has led to the growing expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT). By leveraging the capabilities of smart networked devices and integrating them into existing industrial, leisure and communication applications, the IoT is expected to positively impact both economy and society, reducing the gap between the physical and digital worlds. Therefore, several efforts have been dedicated to the development of networking solutions addressing the diversity of challenges associated with such a vision. In this context, the integration of Information Centric Networking (ICN) concepts into the core of IoT is a research area gaining momentum and involving both research and industry actors. The massive amount of heterogeneous devices, as well as the data they produce, is a significant challenge for a wide-scale adoption of the IoT. In this paper we propose a service discovery mechanism, based on Named Data Networking (NDN), that leverages the use of a semantic matching mechanism for achieving a flexible discovery process. The development of appropriate service discovery mechanisms enriched with semantic capabilities for understanding and processing context information is a key feature for turning raw data into useful knowledge and ensuring the interoperability among different devices and applications. We assessed the performance of our solution through the implementation and deployment of a proof-of-concept prototype. Obtained results illustrate the potential of integrating semantic and ICN mechanisms to enable a flexible service discovery in IoT scenarios.