Ontologies and Semantic Interoperability

Semantic Interoperability is the ability of one information system to exchange and use data transparently with other systems, even if those rely on different data formats, models, or use alternative methods to provide and exchange data. Although some discordance exists in how to implement an interoperable system, researchers and industry agree that interoperability is built upon a minimum of three layers: technical interoperability that aims at overcoming low-level data exchange heterogeneity, syntactic interoperability that aims at overcoming the heterogeneity of the formats in which data is expressed and, finally, semantic interoperability that aim at overcoming the heterogeneous models used by data, translating such data into meaningful information so they can be transparently used. The most common approach used to implement the syntactic and semantic interoperability layers consists on using Semantic Web technologies, especially modelling data using ontologies. This ever-growing approach tends to reuse well-known ontologies such as SAREF and its extensions, the oneM2M base ontology or the Web of Things one. In addition, a wide range of technologies based on the Semantic Web are available online; they could be used for linking models and data to ease interoperability, publish and integrate heterogeneous data, or to visualize either data or models.