An Ontology for an IoT-enabled Smart Library in a University Campus

With the new technology revolution in the past years, traditional libraries are faced with numerous challenges. To meet the needs of users of a smart society, they have to re-engineer their processes and turn into a smart library. The Internet-of-Things (IoT) has played an important role in designing smart libraries as it consists of intelligent devices capable of capturing data in real time. Smart libraries make use of IoT devices to enhance its processes, with in turn reduce manpower costs. A university campus consists of several smart applications such as smart classrooms, smart parking and smart building among others. To be able to interoperate with these systems and promote decision-making among these smart systems, it is important to represent data of a smart library in formalized ways. Ontologies have played important roles in modelling data of a particular domain, promoting knowledge sharing and reuse as well as enhancing semantic interoperability. After analyzing existing ontologies, it was observed that none fitted a smart library. This paper thus presents an ontology for a smart library taking into consideration concepts of IoT.