The Linked Sensor Middleware - Connecting the real world and the Semantic Web

Sensing devices are becoming the source of a large portion of theWeb data. To facilitate the integration of sensed data with data from other sources, both sensor stream sources and data are being enriched with semantic descriptions, creating Linked Stream Data. Despite its enormous potential, little has been done to explore Linked Stream Data. One of the main characteristics of such data is its “live” nature, which prohibits existing Linked Data technologies to be applied directly. Moreover, there is currently a lack of tools to facilitate publishing Linked Stream Data and making it available to other applications. To address these issues we have developed the Linked Stream Middleware (LSM), a platform that brings together the live real world sensed data and the Semantic Web. A LSM deployment is available at http://lsm.deri.ie/. It provides many functionalities such as: i) wrappers for real time data collection and publishing; ii) a web interface for data annotation and visualisation; and iii) a SPARQL endpoint for querying unified Linked Stream Data and Linked Data. In this paper we describe the system architecture behind LSM, provide details how Linked Stream Data is generated, and demonstrate the benefits of the platform by showcasing its interface.