Handling smart environment devices, data and services at the semantic level with the FI-WARE core platform

The development of IoT (Internet of Things) applications poses a number of scientific and technological challenges which stem from the characteristics of the IoT domain itself. These include the huge and increasing number of connected entities (devices, physical objects, people,...) populating the physical environment, the variety of their types which leads to heterogeneity of the data produced or consumed by those connected entities. In this paper we argue that semantic modeling takes up many of these challenges and explain how the core platform developed by the FI-WARE project supports IoT application developers. After a short introduction of the characteristics and requirements of IoT applications we identify the contribution of semantic technologies to address some of them. We describe the FI-WARE platform enablers which support these technologies and illustrate through a real application how these enablers help developers satisfy these requirements.