Semantic Interoperability

Interoperability, on the semantic level, deals with shared understanding of data, between IoT artifacts. Positioned on top of the syntactic layer, semantic interoperability facilitates solutions to problems that arise after the data is in a common format, with syntax understood by all participants. Provisioning of compatibility between not directly compatible data structures, representations, conventions and standards, falls strictly under the responsibility of semantic methods.This chapter introduces the INTER-IoT perspective on data semantics and summarizes it’s achievements in the field of semantic interoperability. Being a generic and far-reaching solution, the syntactic compatibility challenge is also mentioned, as it is a necessary precondition to comprehensive data interoperability suite.