Z-Wave ontology

URL

https://sites.google.com/site/smartappliancesproject/ontologies/zwave.ttl

Description

The Z-Wave ontology covers the application layer of the 3-layer general model of wireless communication defined by Z-Wave. This application layer defines the messages to be exchanged, such as switching a light or increasing the temperature of a heating device. The Z-Wave ontology is taxonomy of the supported type of devices (i.e., basic, generic or specific), the product categories to which these devices belongs to, and the type of functions, or commands, supported by these devices. Each Device class belongs to a ProductCategory class, such as ElectricalDimmer, ElectricalSwitch, ThermostatControl, MotorControl and Sensor. Moreover, devices can be classified in basic devices (BasicDevice class), namely the basic category to which every device must belong, generic devices (GenericDevice class), which allows to specify the general function common to a certain type of devices, and specific devices (SpecificDevice class), which allows to further specialize the functions of a certain generic device. For example, each basic device must be a Controller, Slave or RoutingSlave. Examples of generic devices are a thermostat, meter, and alarm sensor, which are represented by the ThermostatGeneric, MeterGeneric and AlarmSensorGeneric classes, respectively. The generic device thermostat can be further specialized in the ThermostatGeneralV2, SetbackScheduleThermostat, and SetbackThermostatclasses, which are examples of specific devices.

The ontology further represent the commands supported by the Z-Wave devices under the Command class. This class enumerates the commands supported by the standard according to the Annex A of the source used to create our ontology (namely, the ' Z-Wave Technical Basics' document). In case the Z-Wave device is assigned to a SpecificDevice class, it must support a set of mandatory commands as functions of this specific device class, (supportsMandatoryCommand property). Besides the mandatory commands, Z-Wave devices can further support further optional commands (supportsMandatoryCommand property), which may be useful, but the standard does not enforce the implementation of these commands.

Observations

• The ontology is a rather simple taxonomy of devices and commands that was derived from the only publicly available document that we could find, which is not the official protocol specification (not available for free). Therefore, this ontology is intended as an initial representation of the main concepts defined by Z-wave and should be more accurately extended according to the original specification.