A Cloud Architecture for Managing IoT-aware Applications According to Knowledge Processing Rules

The Web of Things paradigm has represented a shift in the conjunction of the Internet of Things (IoT) with people, as it allows treating a smart object as a Web resource. While in a first phase the challenge was the physically management of smart objects, the current demand is to help users in profitably introducing IoT in their own daily life. The paper presents a software architecture for IoT systems able to manage the behaviour of involved IoT entities basing on knowledge processing tools. The main goal is informing the user of the occurrence of events of interest semantically determined starting from actual state of the environment. The architecture exploits the potentialities of the Web of Topics (WoX) approach, a conceptual model that simplifies the designing of IoT applications. Leveraging the WoX approach, the architecture introduces an innovative way to mine knowledge from IoT devices aside from any technological background, so that facing the intrinsic heterogeneity affecting IoT entities. The discussed architecture is composed by different modules integrated into an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), strongly decoupled and provided with RESTful-compliant web interfaces to communicate each other and with the external environment, according to a SOA structure. The paper shows how the system is able to receive data coming from sensors and to semantically interpret them by means of a series of business rules that act as knowledge processor.