A Flexible Context Aware Reasoning Approach for IoT Applications

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, extending the computing and communicating capabilities to virtually every object, raises many new challenges to IoT-enabling systems. At the middleware layer, a context aware adaptive component has to fit the requirements and constraints for different applications, deal with heterogeneous data, be scalable to large scenarios and to resource constrained devices, and manage interoperability. This paper describes Concept Reply context awareness solution, based on a hybrid framework that integrates a semantic reasoning module and multiple processing agents for specialized / optimized processing tasks. Combining different reasoning approaches and adopting proper design choices we developed an extensible and configurable module. We show the advantages of this flexible approach in two case studies that benefit from two different tailorings of the reasoning framework.