FoT-Rules: A Semantic Rule-based Approach for Smart Spaces Through Fog of Things

Abstract

Through the Internet of Things (IoT), Smart Spaces will enable environments to adapt according to users’ needs by using smart and connected objects. However, to turn the IoT view into a reality, the users should know about technical details of such objects, which is not a trivial task for most ordinary users. Therefore, this paper presents FoT-Rules, an approach for the construction of semantic rules aiming to create Smart Spaces through Fog of Things, which is a paradigm for Fog Computing in the IoT. FoT-Rules is designed to enable ordinary users to create and execute semantic rules in the Event-Condition-Action standard (ECA) and to take actions at the edge of the network. In this work, we present a scenario where the user can create semantic rules in the ECA standard and, in order to execute these rules at the network edge, FoT-Rules provides the following functionalities: creation of semantic rules; obtaining of the semantic models that contains information related to IoT devices; execution of a semantic reasoner over the semantic model according to the rule created by the user; a semantic observer that is responsible for observing changes in IoT devices; and in case the rule created by the user is activated, an action is taken for an IoT device. Finally, we performed four types of evaluations on our FoT-Rules approach: reliability, efficiency, scalability and usability.