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NOTE: Semantics and Principles

cabo edited this page Nov 4, 2018 · 1 revision

Notes on Semantics and Engineering Principles

Notes from the discussions in the WISHI calls and events on semantic interoperability.

Terminology

Feature of Interest: general concept in the O&M ontology used to denote some physical feature from which an observation was obtained (in SSN, a sensor observes a property of a FoI) WISHI-20180219

Annotation: semantic metadata that applications can use in discovery and configuration WISHI-20180920

For more terms see: https://github.com/t2trg/wishi/wiki/Glossary-of-Terms

Engineering principles and architectural constraints

Normalizing interaction models.

Narrow waist with semantics. Only few semantic categories instead of large amount.

Semantics benefits

Semantic interoperability has practical value in automating interactions. It can be used to discover things and automate interactions.

Semantic APIs

"Set light bulb to 50%" or "go find all lights in living room and turn them to red" without knowledge of the protocol.

Bridging across systems

On the application side there are currently many programming languages and styles: Alexa devices with message passing and bespoke interactions vs. (more) standardized Thread 6lo network. These have very different interaction styles. Cloud protocols have their own restrictions, for example, you should not send 100 bytes 60 times but rather a single 6kB message. IoT data firehoses need different kind of semantics to make sense.

Semantic interoperability can isolate the thing you want to achieve from all the protocol details underneath.

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