A Semantic-Rich Approach to IoT Using the Generalized World Entities Paradigm

In this chapter, we present an overview of our proposed Generalized World Entities (GWEs) paradigm, to be used to add a semantic/conceptual dimension to IoT/WoT (Internet of Things/Web of Things) procedures. GWEs offer a unified way to model seamlessly, at the conceptual level, both the digital counterparts of elementary entities, such as physical objects, humans, robots and low-level events, and the semantic representations of higher levels of abstraction. These higher levels correspond to structured situations/behaviors implying mutual relationships among simpler entities. The GWEs approach is both a theoretical and a practical framework that can give a significant contribution to solve some important IoT/WoT problems, such as interoperability and uniform IoT controls. Thanks to a unique ontology-based representation language, the chapter shows the possibility of bridging the semantic gap between the recognition of entities at the sensor level and their representation at the conceptual level.