Description of Environments with Semantic Sensor Network

Abstract

The paper proposes a new framework named Semantic Sensor Network (SS). It provides descriptions of the state of environments for physically grounded applications. The difficulty for a sensor network to describe the environment is how to extract meaningful information from sensor readings because they have little meaning by themselves. Although almost systems of sensor networks interpret the readings based on a relation between a sensory devices and an environment, it is hard for a system designer to prepare the relation one by one. SS attaches sensory devices to daily items and employs the attaching relations for the basis of describing the state of an environment. A remarkable achievement of SS is to prepare the class definitions of daily items, to generate the instance data of daily items based on the relations between sensory devices and daily items, and to infer the states of the environments based on the instance data.