Annotating Real-World Objects Using Semantic Entities

Due to protocols such as 6LoWPAN and CoAP, wireless sensor nodes have become an integral part of the Internet. While this makes their data available on the Internet, it still remains a strictly devicecentric approach. However, one is usually interested in the phenomena observed by one or more devices and not in the sensors themselves. To bridge this gap, we introduce and evaluate the concept of Service-Level Semantic Entities (SLSE). They support the automatic semantic annotation of real-world objects based on networked sensor devices. SLSE continuously collect observations of sensors attached to some objects, and aggregates them to descriptions of the objects themselves. It then makes this augmented object data available as (semantic) linked data. This removes several layers of indirection in the semantic data, and allows to directly access properties of real-world objects.