Linking Sensor
Linking Sensor
Linking Sensor
2
See http://52north.org/SensorWeb/clients/OX_RESTful_SOS/index.html.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we
give an overview of relevant related work from the areas of Linked Data and the
Semantic Sensor Web. Section 3 illustrates the different motivations for providing
observations and measurements as Linked Data. Section 4 discusses the question
how sensor data can be turned into Linked Data. The technical requirements and
approaches for implementation are discussed in Section 5, followed by conclusions
and an outlook on future work in Section 6.
2 Related Work
The Semantic Sensor Web [1] is essentially a fusion of technologies of the Sensor
Web on the one hand and the Semantic Web on the other. The Sensor Web
builds on standards for services such as the Sensor Observation Service (SOS)
and the Sensor Planning Service (SPS), as well as on data models and encodings
such as Observations and Measurements (O&M) or the Sensor Model Language
(SensorML). These standards are developed unter the umbrella of the Sensor
Web Enablement (SWE) initiative3 . While these specifications are adopted by
an ever-growing number of sensor data providers, they target syntactic rather
than semantic interoperability. The semantics of the provided observations, pro-
cedures, and observed properties remains ambiguous to a certain degree. This is
especially relevant for the discovery and retrieval of sensor data [15]. The Seman-
tic Web [16] targets these problems for arbitrary data using ontologies, semantic
annotations, as well as deductive and inductive reasoning.
Combinations of these two infrastructures have been proposed in a number of
different flavors. Sheth et al. [1] proposed a metadata approach for SWE services
using RDFa4 (RDF in attributes). Based on a Semantic SOS [4], rule-based rea-
soning on data from different sensors has been demonstrated in an application
that identifies potentially dangerous weather conditions. Neuhaus and Comp-
ton [17] introduce an ontology for sensor descriptions that links a sensor to its
measurement process, the physical feature for which a certain value is observed,
and the corresponding domain of discourse. Devaraju et al. [18] combine this
approach with a generic process ontology to facilitate sensor data retrieval. In
a previous paper, we have outlined a semantic enablement approach for spatial
data infrastructures that enables reasoning on spatial – and specifically on sensor
– data that does not require a modification of established OGC standards [3]. It
can thus be implemented without blocking access for ‘non-semantic’ clients.
These approaches to the Semantic Sensor Web all rely on the Semantic Web
layer cake and especially on the Web Ontology Language (OWL) or the Semantic
Web Rule Language (SWRL), which implies a level of complexity that is often
not required and leads to new problems instead of solving them. The latest
incarnation of the Semantic Sensor Web thus takes a more light-weight approach
based on Linked Data. Providing sensor data in RDF format has been proposed
by different researchers [19,20,9,10], as this format exposes observation data to
3
See http://opengeospatial.org/ogc/markets-technologies/swe for an overview.
4
See http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/RDFa/.
a large number of clients and users that are often not aware of the geospatial
services defined by the OGC. Moreover, this approach allows for easy integration
with other sources in the Linked Data cloud5 . Existing implementations range
from static, converted data sets6 to tools for on-the-fly translation between OGC
services and RDF [10]. The pure mapping of encodings between the GML-based
OGC standards and RDF is straight-forward as they are isomorphic [21].
Patni et al. [22] discuss the challenge of provenance in Linked Sensor Data,
which is especially challenging for phenomena that are observed by a number of
different sensors. The paper applies a provenance ontology to solve this problem
that establishes an explicit link between the observed phenomenon and all in-
volved sensors. Janowicz et al. [10] illustrate the need for a Linked Data Model
in addition to classical data and conceptual models and discuss the challenge
of assigning meaningful URIs [20] for highly dynamic information derived from
sensor data.
3 Motivations: Why?
This section discusses the motivations for making sensor data available using
Linked Data principles [7] and what makes Linked Data more than just another
encoding. It also discusses some first ideas on how to benchmark the success of
a Linked Sensor Data project.
3.1 Motivations
The prime motivation to publish data about sensors and their observations as
Linked Data is to make them available outside of Spatial Data Infrastructures,
provide unique HTTP-resolvable identifiers using URIs, and hence ease the ac-
cess and re-usability of sensor data as well as support their integration and fus-
ing [23]. While this motivation highlights the role of sharing data, sensor data
providers need to take into account several other aspects and understand their
implications:
– Why Linked Sensor Data instead of classical SDIs? Besides increasing the
number of potential clients and thus the usage of the service, the integration
with external (non-OGC) data sources is a classical task that can be ad-
dressed by using RDF as common data encoding. Additionally, at least for
government data, it may turn out that open exchange formats for raw data
become a legal requirements in the near future7 . Such a legislative initia-
tive would be especially desirable for natural disasters, as it would allow for
informed, independent evaluations, and increase the accessibility of relevant
data sets for local interest groups. In case of the oil spill example, observation
5
See http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/ for the current version.
6
See, for example, http://wiki.knoesis.org/index.php/SSW_Datasets.
7
See http://data.gov.uk/ and http://www.data.gov/, for example.
data on the position of underwater oil plumes could be compared against dif-
ferent spreading models, or the data could be combined with marine data
on fish habitats, for example. Finally, the close relationship between Linked
Data and ontologies as conceptual reference models offers a promising alter-
native to one of the Achilles’ heels of SDIs – namely, catalog services and
code lists. An impressive example, demonstrating the interplay of Semantic
Web technologies, ontologies, and Linked Spatiotemporal Data was recently
discussed by Vilches-Blazquez et al. [24] for hydrographical data.
– When we say Linked Data, do we mean it? Linked Sensor Data can only un-
fold its full potential if the linking part is taken seriously [14]. Accordingly,
it is crucial to identify other sources in the Linked Data cloud that could be
linked in a meaningful way; see Section 4 for details. While links between
data differ from the classical inter-document links of the Web, they are still
created for some purpose and to express relatedness. However, providers of
sensor data are interested in keeping their repositories as free of a partic-
ular interpretation as possible. It is unlikely that a provider of sensor data
about water quality will link certain data sets to a DBpedia entry about the
Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Therefore, in most cases links will be created
on-the-fly by users as knowledge engineers [25]. Based on the experience with
documents on the Web so far, incoming and outgoing links may therefore
become an issue at law. This is especially interesting as, in contrast to clas-
sical Web links, the owl:sameAs construct is bidirectional. With a growing
interest in Linked Data, link hubs such as sameAs.org will need to find a
solution to the curation and ownership of links.
3.2 Benchmarks
This section introduces relevant datasets to which Linked Sensor Data can refer
to. Moreover, we outline how to identify potential outgoing links depending on
the corresponding application and argue why these links have to be curated.
Links are the glue of the Web of data and the connections that turn single, iso-
lated information silos into one global graph. They enable cross-dataset queries,
such as the comparison of the current state of a feature of interest with histor-
ical data [28] in the first place. Nonetheless, the generation of Linked Data is
often reduced to the conversion of an existing data source to RDF – without dis-
cussing how to link the data to other sources in the Linked Data cloud. In order
to properly embed Linked Sensor Data in the Linked Data cloud and increase
findability, it is hence crucial to identify useful sources for further information
that are related to a specific service, the sensors it offers, the observed phenom-
ena, or the features of interest. Moreover, picking the appropriate vocabularies is
an essential step to support retrieval and reuse of data. Besides the omnipresent
rdf:about and owl:sameAs, popular vocabularies include Dublin Core (DC) for
metadata, Friend Of A Friend (FOAF) for relationships among people, or the
Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) for categorizations and concept
maps. A vocabulary for sensors and observations is currently developed by the
W3C Semantic Sensor Network Incubator Group8 .
The following example shows outgoing links for a sensor observing the Deep-
water Horizon oil spill, using the Dublin Core, Semantic Sensor Web, and Marine
Metadata Interoperability Platforms ontologies. Outgoing links point to a FOAF
profile, the freebase entry on the Deepwater horizon explosion, to the Geonames
entry on the Gulf of Mexico, and to the New York Times data entry about BP.
...
@prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/> .
@prefix obs: <http://knoesis.wright.edu/ssw/ont/sensor-observation.owl> .
@prefix mmi: <http://mmisw.org/ont/mmi/platform> .
@prefix son: <http://www.csiro.au/Ontologies/2009/SensorOntology.owl> .
...
:dhSOS
dc:description "Deepwater Horizon Observation" ;
dc:creator <http://ifgi.uni-muenster.de/~kessler/foaf.rdf> ;
dc:subject <http://rdf.freebase.com/rdf/en.deepwater_horizon_drilling_rig_explosion> ;
dc:coverage <http://sws.geonames.org/3523271/about.rdf> ;
dc:relation <http://data.nytimes.com/63774392544048824322> ;
obs:observedProperty :oilConcentration ;
dc:relation :dhBuoy .
...
:oilConcentration rdf:type obs:PropertyType .
:dhBuoy rdf:type mmi:NeutrallyBuoyantFloat .
:sensor1 rdf:type son:Sensor .
...
Since links are a core component of Linked Data, their quality and accuracy is key
to meaningful retrieval and reasoning. Undefined vocabulary terms, mismatched
semantics, and unintended inferences can reduce the quality of linked data or
even render them useless9 . Consequently, a fully automated generation of links
and especially of owl:sameAs relations to existing sources may rather do harm
than add semantics. We therefore propose a curated approach where relations are
recommended to the service administrator based on a previously selected set of
Linked Data sources and vocabularies for relations. Adding semantic annotations
8
See http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/.
9
See http://pedantic-web.org/ for a detailed discussion.
based on automatically generated recommendations has already been proposed
for Volunteered Geographic Information [29]; we adopt this approach here for
Linked Sensor Data. Figure 1 shows the workflow for link recommendation and
curation:
1. Sensor metadata (as defined in the service capabilities) and O&M data are
converted to RDF documents [20].
2. Keywords are extracted that match entities on the linked data cloud.
3. These keywords and their specifications and sources are presented to the
user, who can then establish the first owl:sameAs relations.
4. Further potential thematic matches from the Linked Data cloud are com-
puted based on similarity [30]. Potential spatial matches are computed based
on co-location and containment.
5. These potential matches are presented to the user with an indication of the
degree of similarity. The user can then curate these recommendations and
establish the relations with the appropriate vocabularies.
The huge amount of sensor data will require the definition of templates for
O&M data that are applied to new observations as they come in. The overall link-
ing approach follows the idea of bootstrapping: As the amount of Linked Sensor
Data increases, the linking opportunities increase as well. Therefore, new poten-
tial links can eventually be discovered and recommended after every iteration
by inspection of the outgoing link selected in the previous step. Note, however,
that there is no cold start problem, as newly created Linked Sensor Data can
link to other parts of the Linked Data cloud as long as no related Linked Sensor
Data are available. A more connected Linked Data cloud could be generated if
the underlying ontologies specifying the used vocabularies would be linked to
each other [31]; however, this is out of scope for this research. Figure 2 shows a
conceptual design for are curation interface that implements this functionality
for service administrators.
In the mapping process, the recommender service automatically replaces any
concrete values by variables, so that later measurements following the same
scheme can be converted on the fly. The following code shows a sample extract
from a template for oil concentration measurements.
...
@prefix obs: <http://knoesis.wright.edu/ssw/ont/sensor-observation.owl> .
...
:observation$id obs:result :result$id ;
:result$id rdf:value ?//om:result/swe:DataArray/swe:values
...
Sensor
MySpace Scrobbler QDOS SW Wiki
exporter
Wrapper
Conference IRIT
Corpus Toulouse
RAE National
Observation
BBC BBC Crunch 2001 Science
FOAF SIOC ACM
BBC Music Later + John Base Revyu Foundation
Jamendo Peel profiles Sites
TOTP Open-
Guides
Service
DBLP
flickr RKB
Project
Pub Geo- Euro- wrappr Explorer
Guten- Virtuoso
Guide names stat Pisa CORDIS
berg Sponger eprints
BBC
Programmes Open
Calais
RKB
riese World Linked
ECS
Magna- Fact- MDB IEEE New-
South-
tune book
ampton castle
RDF Book
DBpedia Mashup
O&M
Linked
GeoData lingvoj Freebase LAAS-
US CiteSeer
Census CNRS
W3C DBLP
Data IBM
WordNet Hannover
UniRef
GEO
UMBEL Species DBLP
Gov-
Berlin
Keyword
Track Reactome
LinkedCT UniParc
Open Taxonomy
Cyc Yago Drug
PROSITE
Daily Bank
Pub
Med
GeneID
search
SensorML
Chem
Homolo KEGG UniProt
Gene
Pfam ProDom
Disea- CAS
Gene
some
ChEBI Ontology
Symbol OMIM
Inter
Pro
3
UniSTS PDB
HGNC
MGI
PubMed
2 1
4
Mapping 8
5
Recommendation Keyword
9
extraction RDF
Similarity
Measurement
add new
7 relations
6
Curation
Fig. 1. Workflow for link curation. After converting O&M and SensorML data
to RDF (1), keywords are extracted (2) and matched against previously selected
sources in the Linked Data cloud (3). Matches are recommended to (4) and
curated by (5) the user, who adds new relations to the RDF documents and
templates this way (6). These relations can then iteratively be used as input
for a similarity measurement (7) that finds similar concepts and entities in the
Linked Data cloud (8), which serve again as input for the recommendation (9).
[Linked Data cloud figure by Richard Cyganiak.]
5 Implementation: How?
The section discusses the technical aspects of publishing Linked Sensor Data.
We focus on the peculiarities caused by the spatio-temporal dynamics of sensor
data and the challenges they cause for representation, reasoning and provenance.
Any kind of sensor-related data is inherently dynamic. While this is obvious for
observation data whose sole intention is to keep track of the dynamics of the
real world, it also applies to meta-data about sensors. Sensors can be relocated,
their feature of interest can change, and the actual instruments can be replaced.
Phenomena such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill are characterized by their
three-dimensional spatial distribution. Moreover, they also involve a temporal
Fig. 2. Conceptual design for curation user interface. After selecting a node
in the service output (a capabilities document, in this case), the service offers
mappings and allows the user to insert link targets. Potential matches identified
by the keyword mapping and similarity reasoners are highlighted and can be
curated by clicking the corresponding button shown in line 340 of the capabilities
document.
10
See http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes/RDFGraphSyntax.html.
The URI encoding for dynamic information discussed above makes infor-
mation on timestamps available for clients working directly on one these service
URIs. However, once the delivered data is cached or passed on for further process-
ing, information on when the represented facts were valid is lost. This problem
applies to all kinds of data delivered via such URIs, which can come in different
forms based on content negotiation between client and server [32]. For example,
an RDF triple – once published – does not bear any information about whether
the encoded fact is still valid or not. The temporal dimension therefore also needs
to be covered within the dataset. The following example demonstrates how this
information can be attached using a named graph [33]:
...
Acknowledgments
This work has been partly funded by the German Research Foundation’s Sim-
Cat project (DFG Ra1062/2-1 and Ja1709/2-2; see http://sim-dl.sf.net)
and is part of the 52◦ N orth semantics community; see http://52north.org/
semantics.
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