An Internet of Things ontology for earthquake emergency evaluation and response

Recent years have seen the fast-diffusion of internet-connected devices and the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) research and application area. Research works are dealing with technologies that enable the so-called things to communicate among them and with users in order to provide data and/or accomplish tasks. This scenario is posing several challenges so that more and more researchers are dealing with them. Our work deals with the definition of both machine and human understandable descriptions of things by means of ontologies in order to enable the collaboration among physical objects and IT systems. Indeed, recent works highlighted how the IoT technology may be profitably used in several scenarios in order to accomplish complex tasks where physical objects are active participants. First, we extend the Semantic Sensor Network ontology defined by the W3C Semantic Sensor Networks Incubator Group with concepts and roles that describe actuators. This leads to the definition of a comprehensive Internet of Things ontology. Then, with the support from domain experts, we analyze the earthquake emergency scenario in order to define for it a domain ontology by means of adding domain-related concepts to the IoT ontology. Furthermore, we compare our work with others that use ontologies to formally describes things.