12.34 Semantic mapping between IoT ontology and object identifiers
12.34.1 Description
With the development of communications and artificial intelligence technologies, the value of Internet of Things (IoT) is no longer limited to ubiquitous communication networks but providing intelligent services to human beings. These intelligent services appear in many representative scenarios without the aid of human intervention, such as smart home, self-service store, etc. To achieve these scenarios, objects with heterogeneous identifiers (e.g. EPC, Handle, OID, ucode, mCode, Ecode, etc.) need to cooperate with each other without the human intervention. However, all the existing identifiers appear as a sequence of characters and generally lack semantic information. IoT objects cannot identify what the interactive or cooperative object is through the identifier alone. Therefore, oneM2M system needs to enable semantic mapping between IoT ontology and identifiers to facilitate the IoT intelligence. Besides, the operations including create, retrieve, update, and delete (CRUD) of instances frequently occur in some smart scenarios. For example, in a self-service store, when a customer enters a store, a new instance belonging to the class "Person" should be added to the IoT ontology automatically. If a commodity has been bought by a customer, this "commodity" instance should be deleted from the ontology. It is impractical to achieve these instance operations manually. It requires a semantic mapping between the ontology and the identifiers of objects, which will help the IoT system to manage the instances in an unattended manner.
Take a coffee with an EAN-13 identifier (8938515483013) for example. The oneM2M platform can add semantic information (1.4.4.2) to the legacy identifier, which indicates a path from the root node to a class node in the IoT ontology. From the semantic information (1.4.4.2), this object can be mapped to the class "Coffee" other objects can know this identified object is a Coffee instance.
Figure 12.34.1-1 A part of the IoT ontology
12.34.2 Source
RDM-2019-0093-use_case_for_semantic_mapping_between_IoT_ontology_and_object_identifiers
12.34.3 Actors
- Application: the device or object which wants to be mapped to the IoT ontology through its identifier.
- The ontology is a vocabulary with a structure. It could capture a shared understanding of a domain of interests and provide a formal and machine interpretable model of the domain.
- The M2M service platform provided by the M2M service provider
- a. The M2M service platform has a semantic mapping function to discover the associated class that an object belongs to. It's a service layer functionality provided by the oneM2M System.
12.34.4 Pre-conditions
The IoT ontology is required to be deployed on the M2M service platform.
The semantic information of identifiers is required to be related with the IoT ontology.
12.34.5 Triggers
An object is required to be mapped to the IoT ontology as an instance or identify what the interactive object is through its identifier.
12.34.6 Normal Flow
The normal message flow is described as follows:
Figure 12.34.6-1 Message flow for sematic mapping between the ontology and an identifier
- An application sends a request for mapping an object to the ontology or identifying an object to the M2M service platform, which contains the identifier of the object with semantic information added.
- After receiving the request, the oneM2M platform extracts semantic information from the identifier.
- The oneM2M platform then finds the class associated with the object based on the extracted semantic information of the identifier.
- The oneM2M platform returns the name of the class to the application.
12.34.7 Alternative flow
None
12.34.8 Post-conditions
None
12.34.9 High Level Illustration
Figure 12.34.9-1 High Level Illustration
12.34.10 Potential requirements
The oneM2M System shall be able to provide machine understandable semantic information for object identifiers to map the identified objects to corresponding classes in the IoT ontology and enable objects to identify what the interactive object is independently.