Ontological Middleware for Dynamic Wireless Sensor Data Processing

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) raise the interest of multiple business domains . Their ability to monitor and control large physical environment made them very attractive for many application domains. Nevertheless, Wireless Sensor Networks encounter several technical obstacles, which may hinder their integration within business applications. Considering the fact that Wireless Sensor Networks produce a large and diverse amount of data, business applications may have difficulties to select and process relevant information. We distinguish two approaches which address this issue: in-network processing and data processing within dedicated middleware. Whereas in-network processing mainly aims at resource saving in Wireless Sensor Networks, middlewares ease the definition and execution of Wireless Sensor Network data processing for business applications. In this paper, we propose to enhance the common middleware processing approach with the introduction of a contextual ontology. The purpose of this approach is two-fold: (i) to provide only information that match the business application interests, and (ii) to dynamically process Wireless Sensor Network information in order to provide higher semantic level of information to business application.