Collecting, storing, and providing access to Internet of Things (IoT) data are fundamental tasks to many smart city projects. However, developing and integrating IoT systems is still a significant barrier to entry. In this work, we share insights on the development of cloud data storage and visualization tools for IoT smart city applications using flood warning as an example application. The developed system incorporates scalable, autonomous, and inexpensive features that allow users to monitor real-time environmental conditions, and to create threshold-based alert notifications. Built in Amazon Web Services (AWS), the system leverages serverless technology for sensor data backup, a relational database for data management, and a graphical user interface (GUI) for data visualizations and alerts. A RESTful API allows for easy integration with web-based development environments, such as Jupyter notebooks, for advanced data analysis. The system can ingest data from LoRaWAN sensors deployed using The Things Network (TTN). A cost analysis can support users’ planning and decision-making when deploying the system for different use cases. A proof-of-concept demonstration of the system was built with river and weather sensors deployed in a flood prone suburban watershed in the city of Charlottesville, Virginia.
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The SemIoTic Ecosystem: A Semantic Bridge between IoT Devices and Smart Spaces
Smart space administration and application development is challenging in part due to the semantic gap that exists between the high-level requirements of users and the low-level capabilities of IoT devices. The stakeholders in a smart space are required to deal with communicating with specific IoT devices, capturing data, processing it, and abstracting it out to generate useful inferences. Additionally, this makes reusability of smart space applications difficult, since they are developed for specific sensor deployments. In this article, we present a holistic approach to IoT smart spaces, the SemIoTic ecosystem, to facilitate application development, space management, and service provision to its inhabitants. The ecosystem is based on a centralized repository, where developers can advertise their space-agnostic applications, and a SemIoTic system deployed in each smart space that interacts with those applications to provide them with the required information. SemIoTic applications are developed using a metamodel that defines high-level concepts abstracted from the smart space about the space itself and the people within it. Application requirements can be expressed then in terms of user-friendly high-level concepts, which are automatically translated by SemIoTic into sensor/actuator commands adapted to the underlying device deployment in each space. We present a reference implementation of the ecosystem that has been deployed at the University of California, Irvine and is abstracting data from hundreds of sensors in the space and providing applications to campus members.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10384097
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Transactions on Internet Technology
- Volume:
- 22
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 1533-5399
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 33
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3527241
