A Framework for Acquiring Semantic Sensor Descriptions

There has been great effort in developing ontologies for modeling sensor networks, describing various types of sensors and their context. However, when faced with a large scale deployment, the process of acquiring and managing semantic sensor metadata is challenging. This paper focuses on acquiring contextual metadata of sensors, such as location and surrounding environment, as opposed to technical metadata which can be derived from sensor’s firmware. More specifically, the paper proposes a framework for collecting contextual metadata information with help of the mobile devices, which allows usage on the deployment site and as such lowers the cost.