Introducing Thing Descriptions and Interactions: An Ontology for the Web of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) and the Web are closely related to each other. On the one hand, the Semantic Web has been including vocabularies and semantic models for the Internet of Things. On the other hand, the so-called Web of Things (WoT) advocates architectures relying on established Web technologies and RESTful interfaces for the IoT. In this paper, we present a vocabulary for WoT that aims at defining IoT concepts using terms from the Web. Notably, it includes two concepts identified as the core WoT resources: Thing Description (TD) and Interaction, that have been first elaborated by the W3C interest group for WoT. Our proposal is built upon the ontological pattern Identifier, Resource, Entity (IRE) that was originally designed for the Semantic Web. To better analyze the alignments our proposal allows, we reviewed existing IoT models as a vocabulary graph, complying with the approach of Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV).