Kerry Taylor, who is the chair of W3C/OGC Spatial Data on the Web Working Group at the Australian Computer Science Week of Conference, is delivering a talk on Semantic Sensor Networks: The Internet of Things needs the Web of Data.
Please register via Australian Computer Science Week of Conference web site.
Abstract: Gartner said in December that smart cities will use 1.6 billion connected things in 2016 rising to 3.3 billion in 2018. Large scale sensor network systems are not only features of cities and consumer products; but also of the interlinked industries of agriculture, manufacturing, food and health care. The AIOTI alliance of the European Commission concluded in November that “The biggest challenge will be to overcome the fragmentation of vertically-oriented closed systems, architectures and application areas and move towards horizontal open systems and platforms that support multiple applications.” This reflects an environment where a great number of industry alliances and SDOs have formed with a vertical silo approach for service and data interoperability.
On the other hand, ontologies founded on description logic are one of the few success stories for decades of research in knowledge representation and are now standardised and widely used for horizontal data interoperability, in the framework called the Semantic Web or the Web of Data. Formal reasoning is at the heart of a growing number of deployed tools and applications for data interoperability within enterprises and across government.
The Semantic Sensor Networks ontology was originally developed by a collaboration hosted by the W3C in 2009, to describe aspects of sensor networks and sensor data that is needed for loosely-connected interoperability and interpretation at a level above communications networking. The ontology has now entered the standards track of the W3C and OGC through the joint Spatial Data on the Web Working Group. In this talk I will discuss the role of ontologies in the developing Internet of Things and my hopes for the SSN ontology in particular.
Bio: Kerry joined the Australian National University four weeks ago. For the previous six months she was working as a specialist at the Australian Bureau of Statistics after 20 years at CSIRO as a research scientist in the division now known as data61. Her research has focused on data and system integration in multidisciplinary contexts, and she has been working with semantic and sensor systems for at least ten years now. She has also worked as an IT professional in the consulting, publishing, and education industries and government.
Kerry holds a BSc Hons in Computer Science from UNSW 1983 and a PhD in Computer Science and Information Technology from the ANU in 1996. She is a Visiting Reader at the University of Surrey.
