The semantic sensor network ontology, revamped

The Semantic Sensor Network Ontology, popularly known as SSN, was developed by an Incubator Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) over 2009 to 2011. Subsequently, the W3C and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) joined forces to update the SSN as informed by experience, to harmonize it with OGC’s O&M, and to publish a new version to be endorsed as both a W3C Recommendation and an OGC standard in late 2017. The major contribution of the new SSN is a modular structure designed to be more convenient for ontology engineers and data custodians. It also slightly extends the coverage of the previous SSN with new terms for sampling and actuation. SSN retains the ability to comprehensively represent: sensors in terms of what they can sense, and what and how they do sense; observations in terms of what they measure and what values they find; systems (or networks) of sensors in terms of sensor components and how they are deployed; and real-world objects (called features of interest, OGC-style) in terms of their physical properties, what can sense them, and what observations of them have been made. A few little-used SSN terms have been deprecated, and several others have been renamed. For a comprehensive description of new SSN the reader is referred to the specification [10]. A full description of the scope, design rationale and additions, with examples of its application are presented in [11].