An IoT Oriented Ontology for Physical World Awareness in Autonomous Objects

Nowadays, billions of Smart Things need to communicate efficiently, and never as today, communication encompasses different layers: from bits exchanged at the physical level up to meaningful messages promoted at the framework level. To allow Smart Things to communicate autonomously and unambiguously, an approach is to use an ontology, enabling Smart Things to comprehend the communication context and interpret the message correctly. To this aim, we introduce EMPATHY: an IoT-centric ontology that, together with an architecture for knowledge distribution, allows Smart Things to become aware of the characteristics of physical matter they are dealing with and, in case they are actuators, of the transformations and processes they enable. This way, the quantitative description enabled by standards, such as the IEEE P1451.0, becomes a fully qualitative description, enabling Smart Things to become fully autonomous.