Trust Semantics in IoT Entities’ Deployment

Semantics for the IoT domain have been already introduced in several semantic interoperability approaches, towards supporting the (semi-)automated deployment of generic IoT applications in environments where heterogeneous third-party IoT devices are deployed. Depending on the level of interoperability, an application may have to ‘decide’ which IoT devices in that environment are trustworthy for ensuring deployment and for avoiding low quality of services provided. In the open IoT, where a large number of generic applications and third-party devices co-exist, the need to ensure trustworthy deployment of system components is highly important. In this paper we present a simple and extensible modeling approach towards supporting this IoT task. Using fuzzy semantics as an enabler of trust in IoT, we demonstrate how trust can be seamlessly integrated in IoT ontologies. Doing so, these can serve as a secure selection key to an IoT application for selecting, among the available entities, the one(s) that the application should trust for its effective deployment in a specific context.