A semantic infrastructure for a Knowledge Driven Sensor

Web

Deshendran Moodley1 and Jules Raymond Tapamo2

1
School of Computer Science, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa
2
School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, University of KwaZulu-Natal,
Durban, South Africa

Abstract. Sensor Web researchers are currently investigating middleware to aid

in the dynamic discovery, integration and analysis of vast quantities of high
quality, but distributed and heterogeneous earth observation data. Key
challenges being investigated include dynamic data integration and analysis,
service discovery and semantic interoperability. However, few efforts deal with
the management of both knowledge and system dynamism. Two emerging
technologies that have shown promise in dealing with these issues are
ontologies and software agents. This paper introduces the idea and identifies
key requirements for a Knowledge Driven Sensor Web and presents our efforts
towards developing an associated semantic infrastructure within the Sensor
Web Agent Platform.

Keywords: sensor web, ontologies, multi-agent systems, semantic middleware

1 Introduction
Advances in sensor technology and space science have resulted in the availability of
vast quantities of high quality, but distributed and heterogeneous earth observation
data. Sensor Web researchers are currently investigating middleware to facilitate the
dynamic discovery, integration and analysis of this data with the vision of creating a
global worldwide Sensor Web [33][6][9]. Key challenges being investigated include
dynamic data discovery, integration and analysis, semantic interoperability, and
sensor tasking. While it has been acknowledged that abstractions are required to
bridge the gap between sensors and applications [6][9] and to provide support for the
rapid deployment of end user applications [9], the most effective mechanism for
modeling and managing the resultant deluge of software components remains an open
issue. Two emerging technologies in Computer Science that have shown promise in
dealing with these challenges are software agents and ontologies. Agent researchers
propose the use of software agents as logical abstractions to model and manage
software components in large scale, dynamic and open environments [17][34][35].
Software agents are autonomous software components that communicate at the

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 2 Deshendran Moodley and Jules Raymond Tapamo

knowledge level [13][17]. Many agent based architectures have been proposed for the
Sensor Web [14][23][5][2]. However most approaches have limited support for the
construction and evolution of the ontologies to support domain modeling, agent
communication and reasoning, and to represent the algorithms, scientific theories and
beliefs that are routinely applied to sensor data. In previous work we described an
agent based architecture for the Sensor Web [21], i.e. the Sensor Web Agent Platform
(SWAP), and proposed initial components for the semantic infrastructure [31]. In this
paper we introduce the idea of a knowledge driven Sensor Web and describe a
semantic infrastructure that supports both the specification and integration of
scientific theories and system modeling. Additional details of the implementation of
the ontologies and the reasoners can be found in [20].

The rest of the paper is organised as follows. In section 2 key requirements of a

Knowledge Driven Sensor Web and its potential impact is described. Section 3
reviews related research. The SWAP semantic infrastructure is described in section 4
and in section 5 we conclude with a summary of key contributions and some avenues
for future work.

2 A Knowledge Driven Sensor Web

A global Sensor Web must not only deal with issues around the provision, fusion and
analysis of heterogeneous data. It must also support knowledge capture and use.
Knowledge includes data processing and transformation algorithms, scientific theories
and even subjective beliefs. To use this knowledge a mechanism must exist to
dynamically apply knowledge to observations and to combine the results into
meaningful information for end users. This capability to capture and apply
knowledge will lead to a Knowledge Driven Sensor Web (KDSW).

A semantic infrastructure for a KDSW must include support for:

• Data and knowledge dynamism: a comprehensive but integrated conceptual

modeling framework that includes support for not only modeling theme, time and
space, but also uncertainty
• System and application dynamism: modeling of system entities, services,
workflows, agents (system dynamism) and seamless movement between the
conceptual model and the system model to support continuous application and
service deployment
Potential benefits of a Knowledge Driven Sensor Web (KDSW) include [22]:

• Promoting the sharing and reuse of data, knowledge and services

• Facilitating human collaboration and scientific experimentation

Semantic Sensor Networks 2011 31

 A semantic infrastructure for a Knowledge Driven Sensor Web 3

• Reducing information overload and system complexity

• Managing both data, knowledge and system dynamism
• Increasing automation and machine intelligence
A Knowledge Driven Sensor Web can provide specific benefits to a wide range of
users in the earth observation community. Decision makers can access, manage and
visualise information provided by real time monitoring applications. Earth
observation scientists can capture and share earth observation data and knowledge,
and use the Sensor Web as a platform for experimentation, collaboration and
knowledge discovery. Developers can easily design, develop and deploy dynamic
Sensor Web services and end user applications.

3 Related work
A number of agent based Sensor Web approaches exist. These include the Internet-
scale resource-intensive sensor network services (IrisNet) [14], Abacus [2], the agent
based imagery and geospatial processing architecture (AIGA) [23], and the approach
by Biswas et al. [5]. A summary of these approaches is given in [21]. Each approach
proposes some form of layered architecture that provide abstractions to separate
sensor agents from data analysis and filtering agents and aims to ease the modeling of
agent based applications. While these approaches are promising for single or even
groups of organizations building distributed agent based applications, except for the
limited support provided in AIGA [23], no explicit support is provided for creating
and managing ontologies that are required for agent communication and processing in
an open Internet scale multi-agent system [13][34][35].

Ontologies are being widely investigated within the geospatial community to

standardise, dynamically integrate and query complex earth observation data.
Agarwal [1] summarises key advances in ontology research within the geospatial
community. A more recent survey by Compton et. al. [8] describes the range and
expressive power of twelve sensor ontologies. Despite these efforts there are still
many outstanding challenges. The added temporal and spatial dimension associated
with geospatial data requires additional representation support for modeling and
formalising the domain [1][3]. One intuitive approach to model geospatial entities is
to follow the human cognition system. Humans store knowledge in three separate
cognitive subsystems within the mind [19]. The what system of knowledge operates
by recognition, comparing evidence with a gradually accumulating store of known
objects. The where system operates primarily by direct perception of scenes within
the environment, picking up invariants from the rich flow of sensory information. The
when system operates through the detection of change over time in both stored object
and place knowledge, as well as sensory information. Separate ontological

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 4 Deshendran Moodley and Jules Raymond Tapamo

representations for space, time and theme have been proposed [26][31]. However,
these approaches still lack support for representing the inherent uncertainty [3]
associated with sensor data or for representing system entities. Even the widely used
Web Ontology Language (OWL) [25] still lacks core support for representing time,
space and uncertainty [30] and for representing system entities such as agents,
services and processes.

4 The SWAP semantic infrastructure

Fig. 1 shows the different ontologies provided by SWAP. Ontologies are split into
two levels, a conceptual level and a technical level. Conceptual ontologies are used
for modeling and representing observations and theories about the physical world.
Technical ontologies are used for modeling and representing the software entities
(agents) that will host and process these observations and theories.

Fig. 1. SWAP ontology levels

The conceptual ontologies are based on creating separate subsystems as proposed by

Mennis et al [19]. SWAP defines four conceptual dimensions to represent and reason
about knowledge, the traditional dimensions of theme, space and time, and introduces
a fourth dimension for uncertainty. An ontology and an associated reasoner is

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 A semantic infrastructure for a Knowledge Driven Sensor Web 5

provided for each dimension. The reasoners currently use different inferencing
engines: the thematic reasoner uses a Pellet reasoner; the temporal and spatial
reasoners use a Jena rule-based engine; and the uncertainty reasoner uses a Bayesian
inference engine. Domain ontologies for specific application domains are built by
extending the swap-theme ontology. The eo-domain ontology extends the swap-theme
ontology by adding concepts for building applications in the earth observation domain
(Fig. 1). It currently references concepts from the SWEET [27] ontologies, an existing
set of earth science ontologies. Application ontologies specify concepts that are used
for specific applications, e.g. wildfire detection. Application specific concepts are
specified along one or more of the four dimensions. The four reasoners are applied
independently as required to perform inferencing on the application ontology.

4.1 The thematic dimension

The thematic dimension provides a thematic viewpoint for representing and reasoning
about thematic concepts. The swap-theme ontology provides for the representation of
observations and is based on the OGC's model of observations and measurements
[10]. The Observation concept, defined in the swap-theme ontology, describes a
single or a set of observations. Various thematic, spatial, temporal or uncertainty
properties that are known may be specified for an observation (Fig. 2). The different
types of properties are defined in the respective conceptual ontologies, e.g. thematic
properties are defined in the swap-theme ontology and spatial properties are defined
in the swap-space ontology.

Fig. 2. Representing an observation

Two thematic properties are defined in swap-theme, observesEntity describes the

entity being observed (observedEntity), while observesProperty describes the
property of the entity that is being measured (observedProperty). The eo-domain
ontology (Fig. 3) links observable properties from the NASA SWEET [27] property
ontology by making these properties a subclass of observedProperty such as

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 6 Deshendran Moodley and Jules Raymond Tapamo

BrightnessTemperature1 and DryBulbTemperature2. Geographical entities from the

SWEET earthrealm and SWEET phenomena ontologies are also linked by making
these entities a subclass of observedEntity, e.g. Air, Ocean, PlanetarySurface and
Wind.

Fig. 3. The eo-domain ontology and representing a data set of observations

The schema for the thematic reasoner consists of the eo-domain, swap-theme and the
SWEET ontology. This allows the inference engine to infer relations with SWEET
concepts not explicitly referenced in the eo-domain ontology, e.g. that
BrightnessTemperature and DryBulbTemperature are both subclasses of
Temperature.

4.2 The spatial and temporal dimensions

The swap-space ontology provides concepts for representing and reasoning about the
spatial aspects of data. A part of the swap-space ontology is shown in Fig. 4. Spatial
entities include spatial reference systems, spatial projections, spatial resolution and
location. Locations can be common descriptions such as a point coordinate or a
bounding box, or well defined spatial geometries such as a point, line or polygon. A
SpatialThing is defined as an entity that has a Location and the spatial reasoner
determines how two SpatialThings are related. Since OWL does not provide native
support for spatial representation, a set of spatial rules were formulated using the
Jena3 rule-based OWL reasoner to represent the eight spatial operators specified in the
OpenGIS simple features for SQL [24].

1 brightness temperature is the measure of the intensity of radiation thermally emitted by an

object, given in units of temperature
2
dry-bulb temperature is the temperature of air measured by a thermometer freely exposed to
the air but shielded from radiation and moisture
3
http://jena.sourceforge.net

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 A semantic infrastructure for a Knowledge Driven Sensor Web 7

For example, the rule used to determine whether two SpatialThings intersect is:

(?x spc:intersects ?y) <-

(?x rdf:type spc:SpatialThing) (?y rdf:type spc:SpatialThing)
(?x spc:locatedAt ?xExt) (?y spc:locatedAt ?yExt)
spatiallyIntersects(?xExt,?yExt).

The rules use special builtins that were created for each of the eight relations. The
builtins use the JTS topology suite [11] to determine if a specific relation holds
between two spatial things. It first converts spatial things into JTS geometry objects
and then calls the appropriate method on the geometry objects to perform the check.

Fig. 4. The spatial ontology and representing spatial properties of observations in SWAP

The swap-time ontology incorporates the OWL-Time [16] ontology to represent and
reason about the temporal aspects of data (Fig. 5). OWL-Time considers a temporal
entity to be either a temporal instant or a temporal interval. As with the spatial
reasoner an additional set of temporal rules, based on the COBRA temporal reasoner
[7], specify temporal relations.

Semantic Sensor Networks 2011 36

 8 Deshendran Moodley and Jules Raymond Tapamo

Fig. 5. Representing the temporal properties of a DataSet

For example, the two rules for determining whether a time instant is inside a time
interval are:

(?x tme:inside ?y) <-

(?x rdf:type tme:InstantThing),
(?y rdf:type tme:IntervalThing),
(?y tme:begins ?beginsY), (?y tme:ends ?endsY),
(?beginsY tme:before ?x), (?x tme:before ?endsY).

(?x tme:before ?y) <-

(?x rdf:type tme:InstantThing),
(?x tme:inCalendarClockDataType ?timeX),
(?y rdf:type tme:InstantThing),
(?y tme:inCalendarClockDataType ?timeY),
lessThan(?timeX,?timeY).

where tme is the name space of the OWL-Time ontology. The first rule stipulates that
a time instant x is within a time interval y if the starting time of y is before x, and x is
before the ending time of y. The second rule uses the lessThan builtin to determine
whether the time value of a time instant x is before the time value of another time
instant y.

4.3 The uncertainty dimension

SWAP takes a Bayesian probability [28] approach to represent and reason about
uncertainty on the Sensor Web. Bayesian probability is well suited for dealing with
uncertainty on the Sensor Web: where no complete theory is available; where it exists
it might be too tedious or complex to incorporate all the required observations; or
where all the necessary observation data is not available [28].

The occurrence of natural phenomena is sometimes difficult to detect. However,

certain phenomena sometimes exhibit consistent symptoms that are more easily
detected and can serve as an indicator for the occurrence of the phenomena. The
analysis of observations from multiple sensors may be required to determine the
existence of the symptoms of specific phenomena. A Bayesian Network can be used
to determine the probability of the occurrence of a phenomenon given one or more
observable symptoms.

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 A semantic infrastructure for a Knowledge Driven Sensor Web 9

In such a Bayesian Network two types of discrete random variables are required:

• Observable event variables: represents the occurrence of a symptom of a

phenomenon and is a qualitative measure for an observation. The variable must
specify the entity, the characteristic of the entity being observed, as well as the
property that contains the numerical value for the observation. The states are
predefined numerical ranges, corresponding to qualitative descriptions. For
example, wind speed is often used as an indication of the extent of a storm: from
6 to 49 km/hr is a breeze; 50 to 89 km/hr is a gale; 90 to 117 km/hr is a storm and
speeds greater than 118 km/hr is indicative of a hurricane4. Observation values
can be used to populate observable event variables.

• Inferred event variables: represents the occurrence of a phenomenon, e.g. a

hurricane. A phenomenon is represented as a subclass of Phenomenon in the
swap-theme ontology. When a phenomenon is detected, an instance of the
appropriate class is created. These events are inferred from observable events or
other inferred events. Even though these variables are intended for representing
the occurrence of a phenomenon, they can be used to represent any event that is
not easily or directly measurable.

An occurrence of an observable event is determined by evaluating measurements of

some observed property of an observed entity, e.g. the speed of the wind above a
certain threshold results in the occurrence of a "strong wind" event. These observable
events are used to infer the probability of the occurrence of other events, e.g. a very
strong wind is a symptom of a hurricane event. Thus, by analysing one or more
measurements certain phenomena can be detected, e.g. a wind speed above 118 km/hr
and an air pressure lower than 97.7 kPa can be considered to be symptoms of a
hurricane event5. A simple Bayesian Network for determining the probability that a
hurricane is occurring is shown in Fig. 6. The proposed Bayesian Network model
assumes that all variables are discrete and represent events that occur at the same time
and space. A limitation of the current model is that it does not cater for the influence
of past or future events, or the influence of events occurring at different locations.

An ontology to represent Bayesian Networks.

The swap-uncertainty ontology, shown in Fig. 7 extends the BayesOWL [12]
ontology. The BayesOWL ontology proposes five classes to represent a Bayesian
Network, i.e. ProbObj, which could either be a CondProb or a PriorProb, Variable
and State. A ProbObj has a probability value (hasProbValue) of some variable

4 Using the Beaufort scale from http://www.hwn.org/home/bws.html

5
Using the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, from http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/sshws.shtml

Semantic Sensor Networks 2011 38

 10 Deshendran Mood
odley and Jules Raymond Tapamo

(hasVariable) being true. In BayesOWL a Variable represents whether an instancece is

a member (rdf:type) of the
th specified class (hasClass) with one of two states, eith
ither
True or False.

Fig. 6. A Bayesian Network

k to determine the occurrence of an hurricane from air pressu
sure
and wind speed observations

One extension to the BayayesOWL ontology is the specialization of the State classss to
allow for user defined DiscreteStates.
Di The DiscreteRangeState could be a numeeric
interval for numerical data
ata type properties or a SingleNumericState for single numeeric
values.

The swap-uncertainty ont ntology provides support to represent one or more Bayes esian
Networks (BN). Each nod ode in the BN represents either an observation or an inferr
erred
variable. An observa vation variable represents the observation va value
(hasValueProperty) for some
so observed property (observesProperty) of the observ
erved
entity (observesEntity). AnA inferred variable represents the occurrence of so some
phenomena (hasClass). The Th influencedBy property is used to specify the variabless tthat
influence the state of the variable.
v

SWAP uses the BNJ too oolkit for internal representation and inferencing. Bayesi
esian
(B 6. BNJ is an open source Java toolkit for developi
Network tools in Java (BNJ) ping
applications that use Bay
ayesian Networks. It provides a visual Bayesian Netwo work
editor and viewer, a graph
ph representation model for representing and manipulating
ing a

6
http://bnj.sourceforge.net

Semantic Sensor Networks 2011 39

 A semantic infrastructure for a Knowledge Driven Sensor Web 11

BN, a number of inference engines, as well as learning algorithms for constructing a

Bayesian Network from data.

Fig. 7. A fragment of the SWAP uncertainty ontology

A BayesianNetwork instance uses the states of observed variables (observation

instances) to make inferences about whether a phenomena has occurred (inferred
variables). If a phenomena has occurred then an instance of the corresponding
phenomena, which contains the corresponding location and time of the observations,
is created. A schema ontology containing the BN and observation instances from the
knowledge base are provided to the inference engine. The BN is first extracted from
the schema ontology and used to create a BNJ graph model. The URIs of the variables
and their states are used as the variable and state names in the BNJ graph model to
ease the mapping of variables and states between the ontology and the graph model.

In this way the uncertainty reasoner dynamically populates user defined bayesian
networks with observable events, performs inferencing on these events and
determines and records the occurrence of other events.

4.4 System ontologies

SWAP provides three technical ontologies, i.e. swap-data, swap-agent and swap-task
that provide representational support to describe the system entities that are required
for hosting and transmitting observations, and for executing algorithms and theories.

Semantic Sensor Networks 2011 40

 12 Deshendran Moodley and Jules Raymond Tapamo

The swap-data ontology provides descriptions of different data structures that can be
exchanged between agents. This includes coverage (image) and feature data as well as
units of measure.

Representing agents
The swap-agent ontology provides support for representing an agent, the service it
hosts and the interaction protocol required to invoke the service. It provides support
for representing the six different types of agents specified in the SWAP abstract
architecture (Fig. 8) [21]. These are data provider (Sensor) agents, processing or data
transformation (Tool) agents, modeling (Modeling) agents and coordination
(Workflow) and application (Application) agents.

Fig. 8. The SWAP abstract agent architecture [21]

Each agent type has a corresponding service description with a set of common
attributes that capture the conceptual functionality of the service. Sensor Agents
provide a description of the observations that they provide, while Tool and Modeling
Agents provide a description of the data processing algorithms and prediction models
that they respectively provide. Service description attributes are grouped into the four
different conceptual systems, i.e. spatial, temporal, thematic and uncertainty, and are
specified using concepts from the appropriate top level ontology. Service descriptions
also contain service invocation information in the form of input and output mappings.

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 A semantic infrastructure for a Knowledge Driven Sensor Web 13

A request and a response message template is used for invoking and interpreting the
response of the service. The request message template specifies all service invocation
parameters, which may be mandatory or optional parameters that have default values.
Users populate mandatory parameters and may also specify optional parameters for
finer control of the service. These message templates are used to dynamically invoke
a service and to consume and interpret its results. This bridges the gap between
service selection and use, i.e. once a suitable service has been identified it can be
dynamically invoked and its results can be dynamically interpreted.

Representing services and workflows

The swap-task ontology is based on OWL-S [32], and provides algorithmic primitives
to assemble multiple agents into executable agent workflows. An agent is represented
as atomic processes and OWL-S algorithmic constructs are used to assemble multiple
agents into appropriate sequences of invocations or composite processes. The main
extension to OWL-S is a process to agent mapping that allows OWL-S processing
steps to be transformed into agent invocations at runtime. The mapping specifies
request and response templates that are used to transform each processing step into an
appropriate request and response message used to invoke an agent and to interpret its
response.

The technical ontologies provide support for describing the services offered by
different agents and the agent interactions used to invoke these services. Support is
also provided for constructing complex information processing chains or workflows
that may be stored, shared and executed on demand. Since service descriptions and
data models are captured within shared ontologies, they become dynamic entities that
can be accessed, queried and modified at runtime. Selected services can be assembled
into different configurations to form complex executable workflows that may be
deployed as new composite services. This approach facilitates interoperability
between agents, and between agents and humans. It also allows for data models and
service offerings to change, and evolve naturally with minimal impact and without
having to re-engineer the system.

Together, the technical and conceptual ontologies allow SWAP users to represent
complex information processing chains or workflows. Users search semantic agent
service descriptions and identify appropriate sensor data sets, algorithms and models
to apply to these data sets. Once the appropriate agents are identified, users use the
algorithmic constructs in the swap-task ontology to specify a processing workflow
that assembles different agent services in an appropriate sequence for execution. Each
workflow represents new functionality in the system. A workflow can also be
deployed on a Workflow Agent where it can be executed on demand. Since a
workflow is fully specified and executed from its OWL-S specification, the

Semantic Sensor Networks 2011 42

 14 Deshendran Moodley and Jules Raymond Tapamo

appropriate ontologies (which contain the workflow) can be shared, downloaded and
executed locally. Furthermore, once the workflow is downloaded it can be easily
modified and executed locally by SWAP users. A workflow is represented as a
composite process, which means that it can be incorporated into other composite
processes (workflows). This allows for reuse of existing workflows within other
workflows and for creating and managing large and complex nested workflows.
Currently, workflows are created and modified manually via an ontology editor.
However, given that the semantics of both the conceptual and the technical aspects of
each service are specified in the service description, this provides a sound foundation
for automating workflow composition.

5 Conclusion
We have introduced the notion and proposed knowledge representation requirements
and potential benefits of a Knowledge Driven Sensor Web. We contend that a
semantic infrastructure and formal software modeling and engineering abstractions
are both equally important to manage data and knowledge dynamisms as well as
system and application dynamism. We propose an ontology driven multi-agent
system approach to constructing such a system. A key limitation in agent based
approaches is the lack of a comprehensive semantic infrastructure that includes
support for representing uncertainty, theories and beliefs and support for representing
agents, services and tasks. A semantic infrastructure that deals with these limitations
was described. A novel aspect is the introduction of the additional modeling
dimension of uncertainty which can be used for representing and applying subjective
theories. The swap-uncertainty ontology incorporates Bayesian probability, which is
widely used in practical applications to represent degrees of belief, and allows for the
incorporation of Bayesian Networks to represent different theories of cause and effect
relations between events in the physical world. The nature and availability of sensor
data, the accuracy and completeness of the theory that underpins the choice, and the
sequence of the processing steps may contribute an additional element of uncertainty.
The information produced by workflows is frequently approximations or best guesses.
The incorporation of uncertainty allows end users to better understand the quality of
information generated within the Sensor Web.

There are many avenues for future work. The relation of this work to the trend in the
Semantic Sensor Web community towards linked data [9][4][18] warrants further
investigation. Another avenue is the extension of the uncertainty model to capture and
reason about relations between past, current and future events and events occurring at
different locations.

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 A semantic infrastructure for a Knowledge Driven Sensor Web 15

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