Thesis summary Context: This thesis is situated in the Semantic Web of things (SWoT) domain, at the interface between the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Semantic Web (SW). The integration of SW approaches into the IoT aims to tackle the important heterogeneity of resources, technologies and applications in the IoT, which creates interoperability issues hindering the deployment of IoT systems.

Challenges: A first scientific challenge is risen by the resource consumption of the SW technologies, unfit for the limited computation and communication capabilities of IoT devices. Moreover, IoT networks are deployed at a large scale, while SW technologies have scalability issues. This thesis addresses this double challenge and proposes two related contributions.

Contributions: The first contribution is the identification of quality requirements for IoT ontologies, leading to the elaboration of IoT-O, a modular IoT ontology. IoT-O is deployed to enrich data from a smart building, and drive semIoTics, our autonomic computing application. The second contribution is EDR (Emergent Distributed Reasoning), a generic approach to dynamically distributed rule-based reasoning. Rules are propagated from peer to peer, guided by the descriptions exchanged among nodes. EDR is evaluated in two use-cases, using both a server and a number of constrained nodes to simulate the deployment.

The slides are available here