The Semantic Sensor Network Ontology: A Generic Language to Describe Sensor Assets

We introduce a novel approach for describing sensors and their capabilities. Although existing standards for describing sensors and their capabilities as well as their measurements, produced by Open Geospatial Consortium’s Sensor Web Enablement activities (OGC SWE), achieve syntactic interoperability, they do not provide facilities for computer logic and reasoning. We argue that ontologies are an adequate methodology to model sensors and their capabilities. Ontologies enable reasoning, classification and other types of automation to extend the SWE standards of the OGC. A semantic sensor network would allow the network and its components to be organised, queried, and controlled through high-level specifications. The ontology proposed here is not an ontology that organises all the facets and concepts of sensing, but rather one that provides a language to describe sensors in terms of their capabilities and operations. This paper introduces an initial version.