W3C SSN ontology

URL

http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/ssnx/ssn

Description

The SSN ontology is an OWL ontology that provides a framework to describe sensors, observations and related concepts. The official description of the ontology from W3C is available at http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/ssn/ssnx/ssn.

A sensor is a specific device whose purpose is to report measurements and observation real world phenomena. A sensor is different in nature from other types of devices such as actuators, because of its event based behaviour and the temporal relationships that need to be considered. The SSN ontology is a basis for reasoning about the measurements that can ease the development of advanced applications. For instance, when reasoning about sensors, constraints such as power restriction, limited memory, variable data quality need to be taken into account. It is possible to reason either about individual sensors as well as about the connection of a number of sensors.

Observations

• We did not create the SSN ontology in the context of the smart appliances project. We are reusing the OWL version that is available on the W3C website.