John-Paul Rooney of the Guardian recently called on readers to make way for the Internet of Things. He writes, “Growing interest in the interoperability of household appliances and the difference this could make to our everyday lives, is leading to calls for new ‘standards’ to be introduced to accelerate the way to the internet of things. Much like those used in other areas of industry where technology sharing is important, such as the telecoms sector, innovators in the consumer electronics sector and other hi-tech industries believe that the use of Europe-wide ‘standards essential patents’, could help to protect innovators’ routes to market and encourage research and development (R&D) investment.” Read more

The Internet of Things is coming, but it needs a semantic backbone to flourish. With some 25 billion devices expected to be connected to the Internet by 2015 and 50 billion by 2020, providing interoperability among the things on the IoT “is one of the most fundamental requirements to support object addressing, tracking, and discovery as well as information representation, storage, and exchange.” So write the authors of Semantics for the Internet of Things: Early Progress and Back to the Future, Payam Barnaghi and Wei Wang, Centre for Communication Systems Research, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK and Cory Henson, Kno.e.sis – Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing.

Applying semantic technologies to IoT, however, has several research challenges, the authors note, pointing out that IoT and using semantics in IoT is still in its early days. Being in on the ground floor of this movement is undeniably exciting to the research community, including people such as Konstantinos Kotis, Senior Research Scientist at University of the Aegean, and IT Manager in the regional division of the Samos and Ikaria islands at North Aegean Regional Administration Authority.

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