Semantic Interoperability Through a Novel Cross-Context Tabular Document Representation Approach for Smart Cities

Semantic interoperability is the process of representing, editing, and transmitting semantic information in one context, and then receiving and interpreting it in another. It is an important research topic in semantic web, Internet of things, smart city, smart enterprise and artificial intelligence. The current research methods of semantic interoperability generally include standardization, ontology modeling and collaboration templates, each of which has its own internalized limitations. In this paper, a novel cross-context tabular document representation approach (Tabdoc) is proposed, where semantic documents used for cross-domain interaction can maintain the same syntax, concepts, and semantic relations. The new method is implemented under Sign Description Framework (SDF) and an editor is newly developed for semantic document creation. Finally, theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation on open datasets demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed scheme. Experimental results indicate that Tabdoc approach can effectively identify, extract and consistently interoperate semantic components of tabular documents.