Environment Observation System based on Semantics in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is rapidly developing in recent years. A number of devices connect with the Internet. Hence, the interoperability, which is the access and interpretation of unambiguous data, is strongly needed by distributed and heterogeneous devices. The semantics promotes the interoperability in the Internet of Things using ontology to provide precise definition of concepts and relations. In this paper, we demonstrate the importance of the semantics in three aspects: firstly, the semantics means that the machines could understand and respond to the human command. Secondly, the semantics is mainly reflected in the ontology of the physical world. Thirdly, the semantics is important for interoperability, data integration and reasoning. Then, we introduce a semantic approach to construct an environment observation system in the Internet of Things. The environment observation system contains three major components, the first is the ontology of the environment observation system, the second is the semantic map of the environment observation system, and the last is exposing the observation data. Finally, the system publishes the environment observation data on the Web successfully. The environment observation system with semantics provides a better service in the Internet of Things.