A unified and semantic data model for fog computing

The prominence of Internet of Things (IoT) devices is characterized by a wide diversity of network access technologies, including Wi-Fi, Cellular, Lo-Ra, ZigBee, or Bluetooth. Dealing with such heterogeneity is still very challenging in terms of devices, communication technologies, protocols, data formats, and semantics. Data generated from diverse sources use different semantics and models. It makes semantic interoperability as one of the outstanding issues in provisioning seamless communication and services over various IoT platforms. Semantic models are a useful approach for exchanging semantically annotated information between such heterogeneous applications. Seamless communication between different types of applications is usually achieved by using middleware, ontology, semantic web technologies, and there are no unified storage and management methods for information on IoT devices. In this paper, we propose a solution for handling IoT data's heterogeneity and facilitating interoperability and contextual information management. The solution comprises a semantic data model for the generic description of elements in our proposed fog computing platform, namely Fog Services Provider (FSP), to support IoT. Besides, this data model is designed for managing any device using different communication technologies that are fully described and formalized in an ontology format called FSPontex.