MQTT-4EST: RulE-basEd WEb Editor for Semantic-aware Topic Naming in MQTT

Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is an established data transmission protocol in virtually all Smart-* domains. The protocol is based on the publish/subscribe pattern. Messages are published to so-called topics, to which subscribers subscribe, in order to receive the content of interest. As the name of the topic can be chosen freely by the publishing entity without relying on a shared semantic model, the subscribers can insufficiently reason on the semantic of the topic name. However, this can be desirable when topic trees closely resemble structures found in the real world. One approach to formulate semantics in a machine-readable format are ontologies. This paper demonstrates how ontologies allow to couple topic trees with explicit semantics. To this end we present a novel editor that supports users in creating topic trees that follow explicit semantics.