Abstract
Over the past few years the semantics community has developed ontologies to describe concepts, relationships between different entities in various application domains, including Internet of Things (IoT) applications. A key problem is that most of the IoT related semantic descriptions are not as widely adopted as expected. One of the main concerns of users, developers is that semantic techniques increase the complexity, processing time, therefore they are unsuitable for dynamic, responsive environments such as the IoT. To address this concern, we propose IoT-Lite, an instantiation of the semantic sensor network (SSN) ontology to describe key IoT concepts allowing interoperability, discovery of sensory data in heterogeneous IoT platforms by a lightweight semantics. We propose 10 rules for good, scalable semantic model design, follow them to create IoT-Lite. We also demonstrate the scalability of IoT-Lite by providing some experimental analysis,, assess IoT-Lite against another solution in terms of round time trip (RTT) performance for query-response times.