IoT Virtualization with ML-based Information Extraction

Abstract: For IoT to reach its full potential, the sharing and reuse of information in different applications and across verticals is of paramount importance. However, there are a plethora of IoT platforms using different representations, protocols and interaction patterns. To address this issue, the Fed4IoT project has developed an IoT virtualization platform that, on the one hand, integrates information from many different source platforms and, on the other hand, makes the information required by the respective users available in the target platform of choice. To enable this, information is translated into a common, neutral exchange format. The format of choice is NGSI-LD, which is being standardized by the ETSI Industry Specification Group on Context Information Management (ETSI ISG CIM). Thing Visors are the components that translate the source information to NGSI-LD, which is then delivered to the target platform and translated into the target format. ThingVisors can be implemented by hand, but this requires significant human effort, especially considering the heterogeneity of low level information produced by a multitude of sensors. Thus, supporting the human developer and, ideally, fully automating the process of extracting and enriching data and translating it to NGSI-LD is a crucial step. Machine learning is a promising approach for this, but it typically requires large amounts of hand-labelled data for training, an effort that makes it unrealistic in many IoT scenarios. A programmatic labelling approach called knowledge infusion that encodes expert knowledge is used for matching a schema or ontology extracted from the data with a target schema or ontology, providing the basis for annotating the data and facilitating the translation to NGSI-LD.