Policy Management and Enforcement Using OWL and SWRL for the Internet of Things

Abstract

As the number of connected devices is exponentially grow- ing, the IoT community is investigating potential ways of overcoming the resulting heterogeneity to enable device compatibility, interoperabil- ity and integration. The Semantic Web technologies, frequently used to address these issues, have been employed to develop a number of ontolog- ical frameworks, aiming to provide a common vocabulary of terms for the IoT domain. Defined in Web Ontology Language – a language based on the Description Logics, and thus equipped with the ‘off-the-shelf’ sup- port for formal reasoning – these ontologies, however, seem to neglect the built-in automated reasoning capabilities. Accordingly, this paper discusses the possibility of leveraging this idle potential for automated analysis in the context of defining and enforcing policies for the IoT. As a first step towards a proof of concept, the paper focuses on a simple use case and, using the existing IoT-Lite ontology, demonstrates different types of semantic classification to enable policy enforcement. As a result, it becomes possible to detect a critical situation, when a dangerous tem- perature threshold has been exceeded. With the proposed approach, IoT practitioners are offered an already existing, reliable and optimised pol- icy enforcement mechanism. Moreover, they are also expected to benefit from support for policy governance, separation of concerns, a declarative approach to knowledge engineering, and an extensible architecture.