Building the Web of Knowledge with Smart IoT Applications (Extended Version)

The Internet of Things (IoT) is experiencing fast adoption in the society, from industrial to home applications. The number of deployed sensors and connected devices to the Internet is changing our perspective and the way we understand the world. The development and generation of IoT applications is just starting and they will modify our physical and virtual lives, from how we control remotely appliances at home to how we deal with insurance companies in order to start insurance schemes via smart cards. This massive deployment of IoT devices represents a tremendous economic impact and at the same time offers multiple opportunities. However, the potential of IoT is underexploited and day by day this gap between devices and useful applications is getting bigger. Additionally, the physical and cyber worlds are largely disconnected, requiring a lot of manual efforts to integrate, find, and use information in a meaningful way. To build a connection between the physical and the virtual, we need a knowledge framework that allow bilateral understandings, devices producing data, information systems managing the data and applications transforming information into meaningful knowledge. The first column in this series in the previous issue of this magazine titled "Internet of Things to Smart IoT Through Semantic, Cognitive, and Perceptual Computing," reviews IoT growth and potential that have energized research and technology development, centered on aspects of Artificial Intelligence to build future intelligent system. This column steps back and demonstrates the benefits of using semantic web technologies to get meaningful knowledge from sensor data to design smart systems.