7.9 Ontology Management

In general, the oneM2M system needs to represent knowledge as a hierarchy of concepts (ontologies), either external or internal to the oneM2M domain, using a shared vocabulary to denote the classes, properties and interrelationships of those concepts. Storage, discovery and management of ontologies (including both oneM2M Base Ontology and external ontologies e.g. SSN [i.1], SAREF [i.2]) within the oneM2M platform are key for supporting basic and advanced semantic functionalities within the oneM2M platform.

An ontology repository as represented by a <ontologyRepository> resource is capable of storing multiple ontologies in the unified languages adopted by the oneM2M system, e.g. RDFS/OWL. Each of the ontology under management is represented as an <ontology> resource in the oneM2M system. An <ontology> resource may contain the full representation of an ontology or the IRI reference to it. SPARQL queries can be applied directly on the <ontology> resource to perform semantic query and triple-level update.

An ontology repository may also provide the semantic validation service (see more in clause 7.10) via the <semanticValidation> child virtual resource. The service is triggered by sending a UPDATE request that contains the <semanticDescriptor> resource to be validated to the <sematnicValidation> virtual resource.

The resource type definitions of <ontologyRepository>, <ontology> and <semanticValidation> are specified in oneM2M TS-0001 [1], while the corresponding resource procedures are specified in clause 6 of the present document.