RDF provisioning for the Internet of Things

Abstract

We present the platform-independent Wiselib RDF Provider for embedded IoT devices such as sensor nodes. It enables the devices to act as semantic data providers. They can describe themselves, including their services, sensors, and capabilities, by means of RDF documents. Used in a protocol stack that provides Internet connectivity (6LowPAN) and a service layer (CoAP), a sensor can autoconfigure itself, connect to the Internet, and provide Linked Data without manual intervention. We introduce Streaming HDT, a lightweight serialization format for RDF documents that allows for transmitting compressed documents with minimal effort for the encoding; this is tailored for typical IoT applications where the embedded devices are often senders and seldom receivers of complete documents.