In the past years, standardization in IoT has largely focused at the technical communication level, leading to a large number of different solutions based on various standards and protocols, with limited attention to the common semantics contained in the message data structures exchanged at the technical level. As a result, there is widespread fragmentation in current market and technology, characterized by non-interoperable concepts. The Smart Appliances REFerence ontology (SAREF) is a shared model of consensus developed in close interaction with the industry and with the support of the European Commission. It is published as a technical specification by ETSI (TS 103 264 - V1.1.1) and provides an important contribution to achieve semantic interoperability for smart appliances. This presentation builds on the success achieved in standardizing SAREF and presents SAREF4EE, an extension of SAREF to fully support demand/response use cases in the Energy domain, created in collaboration with the EEBus and Energy@Home industry associations to interconnect their (different) data models. By using SAREF4EE, smart appliances from manufacturers that use the Energy@Home or EEBus standards can easily communicate with each other and associate into single device-application-platform ecosystems. Further extensions of SAREF will be created to support use cases in different domains.
Dr. Laura Daniele is a scientist in the area of ontology engineering and semantic technologies. She graduated in Electronic Engineering from the University of Cagliari (Italy) and developed her MSc thesis at the University of Twente (Netherlands) by means of the European Socrates/Erasmus program. In 2011, she obtained her PhD from the University of Twente on model-driven development of context-aware mobile applications. Since 2011 she works at TNO, the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research. Her interest is to provide data integration solutions to enable semantic interoperability among various organizations that need to share data, but use different terminologies, standards and/or heterogeneous IT systems. Her research focuses on the application of semantic technologies in the Internet of Things, especially in the Smart Home environment. Laura has developed a number of ontologies in several domains (http://ontology.tno.nl/) and is the creator of the Smart Appliances REFerence ontology (SAREF) for the European Commission and standardized by ETSI (https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/blog/new-standard-smart-appliance...). She currently collaborates with Google, schema.org, Nest and SmartThings in an initiative that aims at bringing SAREF and other relevant vocabularies in an harmonized extension of schema.org for the IoT. Laura is active in various European research projects and has authored many international publications.
