A Universal Ontology for Sensor Networks Data

In this paper, we present our work towards the development and evaluation of an ontology for searching distributed and heterogeneous sensor networks data. In particular, we propose a two layer prototype ontology that utilizes the IEEE Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) as a root definition of general concepts and associations and two sub- ontologies: the sensor data sub-ontology and the sensor hierarchy sub-ontology. The proposed ontology was implemented using Protege 2000 and eventually evaluated using the RDQL language (RDF Data Query Language). The performance analysis demonstrated the ability of the ontology-based search to improve both the precision and recall rates and enhance the interoperability between different sensor networks domains through the use of the universal SUMO ontology.