A Service Oriented Model for Semantics-Based Data Management in Wireless Sensor Networks

The emerging heterogeneity of data management, programming models and operating platforms in sensor nodes are making the seamless interoperation of devices a challenge. We consider this problem and leverage on the concepts of semantic web and service-oriented design to propose a model that adds a semantics and service-oriented layer to existing network models. This added layer hides the hardware as well as software implementation details from the application layer and thus allows seamless data management between nodes whose capabilities may even be unknown. The proposed model builds on top of well established standards OWL and OWL-S to encapsulate sensor data and services as hierarchical ontology and provides interfaces for service advertisement and discovery. A case study has been discussed whereby the proposed model is used for service-oriented data management (acquisition, archival, processing).