Hybrid Ontology Matching for Solving the Heterogeneous Problem of the IoT

The vision of Internet of Things is to connect everyday objects through embedding wireless devices, so that they can interact with each other and provide new services. One of major challenges for the IoT is the heterogeneous problem. Information generated by different IoT objects will not be compatible, which hinders data communications between the IoT objects. In this paper, we study semantic technology for integrating heterogeneous information in the IoT. We propose to use ontologies to model the schema of data generated by the IoT objects, and propose a hybrid ontology matching approach to solve the heterogeneous problem. The proposed approach uses multiple matchers to compute similarities between ontology elements, and computes weight for each matcher by making use of the hierarchical structure of ontology. Experimental results show that our method can effectively filter out wrong mappings and obtain alignments with high quality between ontologies.