Domain Experts Surfing on Stream Sensor Data over Ontologies

An increasing number of sensors are being deployed in business critical environments, systems, and equipments; and stream vast amount of data. The operational effciency and effectiveness of business processes relies on domain experts' agility in interpreting data into actionable business information. Yet domain experts rarely have technical skills and knowledge on formal data retrieval tools, such as textual query languages, to specify and extract data of interest. In this paper, we report an ontology-based visual query system, namely OptiqueVQS, how it is extended for a stream query language called STARQL, and its first encounter with domain experts at Siemens AG. OptiqueVQS is valuable also conceptually as an instance of the end-user programming paradigm in pervasive environments aiming to empower end users to orchestrate data and devices distributed across the physical environment.