Abstract
The Semantic Web with its aim of enabling information on the Web to become machine-interpretable and interoperable using languages for knowledge representation, has provided a means to achieve this for the Internet of Things (IoT).
Through the creation of ontologies to define IoT concepts within a scope, semantic enrichment can have a doubled-edged effect when it comes to search and discovery. If ontologies are dense and detailed in their expressivity, the resolution of search queries from semantic stores can suffer from significant latency. Therefore, a careful approach needs to be taken when defining an ontology that is considerate to the nature of IoT data and devices.
For managing and exposing annotated information, the Web Service paradigm emerged as a reliable means to achieve this, due to its success with enabling the exchange of virtual information on the Web. But due to the dynamic environment of the IoT landscape, web services need to be adaptive.
The diverse nature of the IoT has emphasised the need for enabling interoperability. To maximise consumption of information from physical and virtual resources in the IoT ecosystem, frameworks must integrate information from heterogeneous sources that could be dedicated to a particular domain or use case, but can be accessed through a common interface.
To address these problems, the work in this thesis has led to the development of semantic models that are lightweight, and support minimal storage and efficient query processing in constrained IoT networks.
The works also investigated and developed methods that enable the integration of IoT information that is compatible with the mechanisms of how web services operate in the Web, but also providing autonomous and scalable means of handling dynamic information and services relating to sensor devices, their data and consumer requirements.
Finally, the work here addressed the provision of technologies for the virtualisation, federation, and interoperability of multi-domain IoT systems. This involved adopting and evolving solutions provided for the preceding challenges above and providing a comprehensive solution for multi-domain IoT integration and consumption.