A holistic view over ontologies for Streaming Linked Data
Abstract
Streaming Linked Data represents a domain within the Semantic Web dedicated to incorporating Stream Reasoning capabilities into the Semantic Web stack to address dynamic data challenges. Such applied endeavours typically necessitate a robust data modelling process. To this end, RDF Stream Processing (RSP) engines frequently utilize OWL 2 ontologies to facilitate this requirement. Despite the rich body of research on Knowledge Representation (KR), even concerning time-sensitive data, a notable gap exists in the literature regarding a comprehensive survey on KR techniques tailored for Streaming Linked Data. This paper critically overviews the key ontologies employed in RSP applications, evaluating their data modelling and KR abilities specifically for Streaming Linked Data contexts. We analyze these ontologies through three distinct KR perspectives: the conceptualization of streams as Web resources, the structural organization of data streams, and the event modelling within the streams. An analytical framework is introduced for each perspective to ensure a thorough and equitable comparison and deepen the understanding of the surveyed ontologies.
1.Introduction
Fig. 1.
The paper’s contributions. A three-folded perspective on the knowledge representation efforts for RDF Stream Processing respectively based on the FAIR principles, a meta [C]o[NC]e[PT]ualization, and the [C]ommon [E]vent [M]odel.
![The paper’s contributions. A three-folded perspective on the knowledge representation efforts for RDF Stream Processing respectively based on the FAIR principles, a meta [C]o[NC]e[PT]ualization, and the [C]ommon [E]vent [M]odel.](https://ip.ios.semcs.net:443/media/sw/2024/15-5/sw-15-5-sw243570/sw-15-sw243570-g001.jpg)
In recent years, the Semantic Web community has witnessed a growing interest in streaming data for application domains that combine the presence of Data Variety (i.e., highly heterogeneous data sources) with the need to process data as soon as possible and before they are no longer useful (Data Velocity). Examples of such application domains include Smart Cities, Industry 4.0, and Social Media Analytics. Stream Reasoning (SR) [29] is a research initiative that combines Semantic Web with Stream Processing technologies to the extent of addressing the aforementioned challenges at the same time. SR counts several research outcomes that span across Continuous Querying, Incremental Reasoning, and Complex Event Recognition [31]. RDF Stream Processing (RSP) is a subarea of SR that focuses on the processing of RDF Streams [65]. In particular, the research activities around RSP, include a growing number of applied research works due to the availability of working prototypes, benchmarks, and libraries [49] that, in turn, spawn research on Streaming Linked Data (SLD) [67,70].
While data streams become more available on the Web, the community started discussing best practices to publish data streams in an interoperable manner. To this extent, the FAIR data initiative is promising. Indeed, Tommasini et al. reinterpreted some of the steps of the linked data lifecycle to answer the question “how can we make (streaming) data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) [67]?.
Tommasini et al. consider several resources published under the SR umbrella. A number of works emerged that show how to access and process data streams on the Web [49]. Even though a number of domain-specific ontologies have been used in SLD applications, little has been done regarding the data modelling and knowledge representation efforts that SLD applications entail.
In this paper, we dig deeper into this claim by surveying the related literature and isolating such efforts. In particular, we investigated research papers that apply RSP, i.e. a subset of SR, as a solution. Like in similar works, we systematically select the papers, defining inclusion criteria and filtering methods. We extracted the ontologies used in these selected papers to model the data streams. We study such ontologies from three perspectives: (i) A Thirty-Thousand Foot View, which observes streams as Web resources analogous to dataset yet characterized by the velocity of changes; such view surveys existing practices for data modelling and KR for data streams. This view follows a top-down approach and starts from the FAIR principles [73] and verifies the compliance of several ontologies under survey. (ii) A Ten-Thousand Foot View, which gets closer to the streams and investigates its content; the result is a meta-conceptualization that empirically describes the structure of SLD vocabularies and ontologies. The definition of such a framework is guided by a review of existing stream processing conceptualizations [1,3,20]. (iii) A Thousand Foot View that narrows down even more until observing the internals of the items that populate a data stream, i.e., events. Thus, such a view leverages the Common Event Model [72] to study and explain how structurally SLD are presented. Our analysis shows how such a view complies with the inner parts of the stream representation.
Figure 1 summarizes our three-folded perspective, designed to highlight different aspects concerning knowledge representation for SLD by progressively zooming in. Indeed, higher levels offer a broader analysis than the ones below, encouraging a holistic view of the central concepts, i.e., Data Streams and their interrelations (30k), the classes and properties characterizing the content of data streams (10k), and the structure of the event as the unit of information that populate the streams (1k).
Outline: Section 2 introduces the necessary background to understand the paper’s content. In Section 3 we introduce the ontologies that are being investigated. Sections 4, 5, and 6 present the three views from higher to lower. Section 7 details the related work, and Section 8 concludes the paper.
2.Preliminaries
This section presents the fundamental notions needed to understand the paper’s content. In particular, we offer the survey methodology and the Streaming Linked Data lifecycle.
2.1.Survey methodology
Our survey follows the guidelines of the systematic mapping research method [21], which has already been used successfully for surveys in the Semantic Web [55]. In particular, our investigation aims at answering the following research question (RQ):
RQ1 What characterizes the knowledge representation efforts for managing heterogeneous data that are streaming or highly dynamic?
The integration of heterogeneous data is a significant part of Semantic Web Research. In addition, RQ1 includes two main components, i.e., Streaming/Highly Dynamic Data and knowledge representation. The former relates to application domains like the Internet of Things or Social Media Analytics (financial analysis, Smart Cities, and cluster management). The latter is central in applications that deal with complex information needs. Together, they point to contributions from the Stream Reasoning community, particularly to SLD. Indeed, under the SR initiative, several engines, query languages, and benchmarks were proposed to address SLD use cases.
To collect relevant studies, we initially conducted a keyword-based search on Google Scholar, the IEEE Xplore, and ScienceDirect and investigated their citations to retrieve further interesting studies. We used the following keywords to retrieve 620 papers:
– Stream Reasoning
– RDF Stream Processing
– Streaming Linked Data
– Linked Stream Data
– Incremental Reasoning
– Ontology AND Streaming/Dynamic
– Ontology AND Event
– Observation AND Ontology
The next steps of our collection apply a number of filters to reduce the number of papers and narrow the analysis. To this extent, we identified different inclusion criteria (IC) indicated below. Notably, IC1-4 are based on the papers’ metadata, while IC5 and IC6 are content-based.
IC1 papers should be written in English
IC2 papers should be peer-reviewed
IC3 papers should be published in the last 10 years,
IC4 papers should have at least 10 citations.
IC5 papers should apply a SR/RSP solution to process data streams,
IC6 papers should present/reuse a domain-specific ontology to model the data in the processed streams,
Like in [55], we apply Metadata-based filtering to the papers, screening their title, abstract, and publication venue and, then, we apply the Content-based filtering step drilling down to the papers introduction, conclusion and if needed, the full text. Finally, we proceeded with an enrichment step (aka snowballing), which aims at expanding the relevant papers based on investigating their citations and related work. Especially for papers proposing SLD engines, it was very beneficial to investigate their citations as it revealed many use case papers.
Our analysis identified 32 papers from which we extracted 10 ontologies. The extracted ontologies are commonly used in one or more identified papers. The last step of our analysis was dividing the ontologies into two groups. The first group addresses SLD from a publication/discovery standpoint. Given the abstract view, we name the group Thirty-Thousand Foot View. The second group looks at SLD from a processing standpoint, which is a lower level of abstraction. Therefore, we name this group the Ten-Thousand-Feet View. We also notice that within the latter group, there is an even lower abstraction point of view, which we call the Thousand Foot View, and it concerns the representation of data points within the streams. Figure 2 visualizes the selection process, while Table 1 lists the selected ontologies, their prefixes, each view they cover, and the papers they originated from.
Fig. 2.
Collection and filtering methodology visualized.
Table 1
Ontologies for Streaming Linked Data: summary. (✓: supported,
| Ontology | Prefix | 30kft | 10kft | 1kft | Projects |
| VoCALS | vocals | ✓ | [24,51,67] | ||
| LDES | ldes | ✓ | [69,71] | ||
| SSN/SOSA | ssn/sosa | ✓ | [2,23,25,37,39–42,46–48,51,54,56,58] | ||
| SAREF | saref | ✓ | [26–28] | ||
| IoT Stream | iots | ✓ | ✓ | [2,38] | |
| SIOC | sioc | ✓ | ✓ | [7,9,10,44] | |
| LODE | lode | ✓ | [12,50] | ||
| ActS | acts | ✓ | ✓ | [6,11] | |
| Frappe | frp | ✓ | ✓ | [9] | |
| SAO/CES | sao/ces | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | [39,54] |
2.2.Time(liness) and events
In this section, we present some essential concepts that will recur alongside the remainder of the paper.
Time has always been under the scope of research in knowledge representation. Despite the number of proposals, there is still little agreement across communities, given the cascading consequences of temporal modelling. Directly related to the notion of time is the concept of change. Indeed, datasets are always subject to updates, ontologies are amended and revised, and sometimes, the answer to a given question changes too. Indeed, variability is an essential property of many concepts and, thus, represents a concern for knowledge representation and reasoning. Either way, temporality is represented with an (partially) ordered, discrete, and monotonic domain, e.g., natural numbers. Partial order allows the representation of simultaneous data items by assigning the same integer, a.k.a. the same timestamp. Discreteness and monotonicity are leveraged by the operator semantics to cope with the unbounded nature of input streams [68].
This paper also focuses on research works that leverage time as a measure of timelines, i.e., the need for processing data as soon as they are produced and before they are no longer helpful. Later in Section 3.1, we discuss foundational ontologies often imported to represent such concepts, we provide a brief overview of the necessary notions.
Such works focus on abstractions such as streams or events. The former represents unbounded yet ordered data using non-strict temporal ordering, which is leveraged to define the processing semantics. In these regards, we say time plays the role of punctuation, i.e., it is used in stream processing systems to manage and control data flow and handle time-related tasks.
The latter, i.e., events are occurrent, i.e., they refer to the most general type of thing that happens in time (occurrence). Events are leveraged to describe the presence of change in a time-varying domain where facts are discovered/forgotten while time progresses. This paper focuses on works that operate using instantaneous events, which have an associated timestamp. Although interval-based time semantics is also possible [4], it is often limited at the ontological level or represented using a duration statement.
Last but not least, it is worth mentioning endurants (aka continuants) that oppose to occurrent as they refer to things that happen through time (endurance), and whose identity is not implied by the time domain itself. In this paper, we focus on endurants in the context of query answering. Indeed, continuous queries are a family of queries in SLD that consume and produce streams, and their evaluation is endless unless explicitly terminated.
2.3.Streaming Linked Data
![Streaming Linked Data life-cycle from [17].](https://ip.ios.semcs.net:443/media/sw/2024/15-5/sw-15-5-sw243570/sw-15-sw243570-g003.jpg)
RDF Stream Processing. Over the last decade, the Semantic Web community has made various proposals for languages to query RDF data in real time. The majority of these proposals involved extending RDF by adding timestamps or time intervals to each triple or graph. Notable languages in this category include C-SPARQL [34], Streaming SPARQL [74], CQELS-QL [45], and even more [31]. These languages expanded upon the SPARQL syntax to incorporate variations of sliding windows and, in some cases, introduced additional query functions. However, the semantics governing the behavior of these windows were not consistent, leading to varying operational behaviors. Consequently, these languages exhibited different syntax, semantics, and disagreements over the correctness of query results [30].
To address this issue, a unified formalization of continuous query processing over RDF streams was introduced in [30], known as RSP-QL, and a library RSP4J [65]. The former successfully integrates continuous query over RDF streams evaluation semantics and operational semantics of windows, enabling the characterization of existing SPARQL extensions for continuous querying. The latter aims at unifying existing RSP systems via a unique API inspired by RSP-QL primitives. Together, they contributed to pushing the state-of-the-art via the formalisation and prototyping of new languages [61] and systems [57]
Lifecycle. The Streaming Linked Data Lifecycle [17,64] proposes several guidelines for managing data streams on the Web. Figure 3 depicts the whole life-cycle and highlights the Model and Describe steps, which both require a knowledge representation effort. The Model step takes care of modelling the content of the stream using a specific ontology-based knowledge representation. In contrast, the Describe step focuses on describing the stream itself as a Web resource. The latter aligns with the Thirty-Thousand Foot View, while the former aligns with the Ten-thousand and Thousand Foot View. Each of these steps requires stream-specific ontologies and (rich) metadata. While the other steps are out of scope for this paper, it is worth mentioning that Step (0) is about naming Web Streams using appropriate URIs; Step (2) is about structuring of stream data events; Step (3) focuses on converting streaming data into a machine-readable format; Step (5) is about serving data using protocols that enable continuous data access (e.g., WebSockets), and Step (6) relates to Web Stream Processing.
3.Selected works
This section details the selected SR ontologies that will be investigated using the proposed Thirty-Thousand, Ten-Thousand, or Thousand Foot View.
3.1.Foundational ontologies
Table 2
Summary of foundational ontologies
| Ontology | Prefix | Relevant classes | Relevant properties |
| OWL-time | time | TemporalEntity, TimeInstant, TimeInterval | inXSDDateTimeStamp, hasTime |
| PROV-O | prov | Activity, Event | atTime |
| DCAT | dcat | Dataset | |
| Event ontology | eo | Event |
We first describe four general ontologies that are frequently imported into the SR ontologies we will discuss later. Moreover, we highlight parts of their conceptualizations that are relevant to understand the content of the paper and summarize them in Table 2.
OWL Time11 is an ontology that captures temporal concepts. It is extensively used to describe the temporal properties of Web resources. OWL Time models both temporal intervals and instants. Its conceptualization includes, but is not limited to, dates, temporal entities, and Allen’s Algebra Relations.
PROV-O22 captures the PROV data model using OWL2. The ontology aims at enabling provenance information exchange across systems.
DCAT33 is an RDF vocabulary designed to foster interoperability among data web-published catalogs. It focuses on describing how data catalogs and datasets are accessible and distributed.
Event Ontology44 is an OWL ontology originally designed in the context of the Music Ontology by the Centre for Digital Music. The ontology was intended to describe performances, compositions, recordings, or sound generation. Nevertheless, its generality fostered its adoption making EO the most used event ontology in the Linked Data community [59].
3.2.SLD-specific ontologies
When surveying the literature, we found that the following ontologies are being used for the description and modelling of streaming data as Web resources:
The Vocabulary for Cataloging Linked Streams (VoCaLS) is an ontology [63] that aims at fostering the interoperability between data streams and streaming services on the web [63]. It consists of three modules for 1) publishing of streaming data following the Linked Data principles, 2) description of the streaming services that process the streams, and 3) tracking the provenance of stream processing [63].
The Stream Annotation Ontology (SAO) allows publishing derived data about IoT streams. It is designed to represent both raw and aggregated data. The vocabulary allows to describe the aggregation transformations in depth. SAO relies on PROV-O to track the aggregation provenance and OWL-Time for the temporal annotations [43].
The Complex Event Ontology (CES)55 extends OWL-S to support automated discovery and integration of sensor streams. It was designed to describe event services and requests, therefore it can be used to annotate streaming services. However, there is no distinction between streams publisher and consumers. Provenance tracking is possible at the level of transformation by distinguishing primitive and complex event services. Notably, CES was designed to be used in combination with SAO and, thus, we consider them together in our analysis [35].
Linked Data Event Stream (LDES)66 defines a collection of immutable objects that evolves over time, describing both historical and real-time updates. LDES uses the TREE specification77 for the modelling of the collections and data fragmentation purposes when the size of the collections becomes too big for a single HTTP response. TREE defines a collection of objects that adhere to a certain SHACL shape, and how these collections can be fragmented and interlinked using multi-dimensional HTTP pagination [70].
IoT Stream a vocabulary for the annotation of (IoT) streams. It extends the SOSA ontology (see below) with the notion of Streams, Events and Analytics that can be extracted from the streams [32].
Furthermore, we additionally identified the following prominent ontologies used in RSP applied research and will investigate their structure and internals when used as a knowledge representation in stream reasoning applications:
The Semantic Sensor Network (SSN)88 is the W3C recommendation to describe sensors, platforms, devices, and observations [62].
The Sensor Observation Sampling Actuator99 (SOSA) ontology is the result of the community attempt to rewrite SSN to the extent of making the ontology more usable. The ontology integrates many rewriting proposals and ultimately reduces the ontological commitment of SSN by selecting a core module relevant for most IoT applications. It is a modular ontology design, where SSN can be seen as an extension of SOSA.
The Smart Applications REFerence ontology1010 (SAREF) aims at enabling interoperability between different IoT providers. It is similar to SOSA/SSN but provides specific classes for sensors and observations (called Devices and Measurements), in comparison with SSN, which is very generic. SAREF thus has various extensions tailored for specific domains.
The Linked Open Descriptions of Events (LODE) is an RDFS vocabulary that aims at unifying existing event ontologies, such as the Event Ontology. LODE represents only facts using the 4W framework, i.e., What, When, Where and Who [59].
Frappe is a vocabulary for spatio-temporal streaming data analytics. Frappe borrows its conceptualization from the domain of photography. It represents the world as a sequence of frames. Events occur within a spatio-temporal context. To represent the spatial context Frappe uses three classes, i.e., Grid, Cell, and Place, and models time using the OWL Time ontology [8].
The Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) describes the information that online communities (e.g., wikis, weblogs, social networks, etc.) have about their structure and online community content [22].
The Activity Streams 2.0 (ActS)1111 vocabulary includes classes and properties to describe past, present and future activities. The vocabulary consists of (i) a core that generalizes the structure of an activity, and (ii) an extended module that includes properties that cover specific types of activities common to many social Web application systems.
All surveyed ontologies, their prefixes and which views they cover are summarized in Table 1. Figure 4 visualizes the dependencies between the various selected SLD ontologies and the imported concepts or complete ontologies that they share. Certain SLD ontologies do not import a whole ontology, but rather import a limited subset of concepts of a certain ontology, this is visualized with the full dependency arrow in Fig. 4, while complete imports of ontologies are visualized with dashed arrows. Note that the figure only depicts overlapping imports, i.e. imported ontologies that at least two ontologies share. Ontologies imported by a single SLD ontology are not depicted in order to keep a visual overview.
Fig. 4.
Overview of dependencies between the selected SLD ontologies and the imported concepts/ontologies they share.
4.Thirty-thousand foot view: Web streams
The thirty-Thousand-Foot View for SLD observes data streams as Web resources, i.e., the fundamental building blocks of the World Wide Web, and focuses on their metadata, governance, and provenance. Therefore, we reformulate our research question as follows:
RQ
Only four of the ten selected ontologies have the notion of data streams as Web resources, the others are not included in this discussion. These four ontologies include VoCALS, SAO/CES, LDES, and IoTStream.
4.1.Analysis framework
Our analysis builds upon the preliminary adaptation of the FAIR principles proposed in [67]. The original FAIR Principles [73] are reported below:
Findable. (F1) Data should be assigned unique and persistent identifiers, e.g., DOI or URIs. (F2) Data should be assigned metadata that includes descriptive information, data quality, and context. (F3) Metadata should explicitly name the persistent identifier since they often come in a separate file. (F4) Identifiers and metadata should be indexed or searchable.
Accessible. (A1) Data and metadata should be accessible via (a) free, (b) open-sourced, and (c) standard communication protocols, e.g., HTTP or FTP. Nonetheless, authorization and authentication are possible. (A2) Metadata should be accessible even when data is no longer available.
Interoperable. (I1) Data and metadata must be written using formal languages and shared vocabularies that are accessible to a broad audience. (I2) Such vocabularies should also fulfill FAIR principles. (I3) Data and metadata should use qualified references to other (meta-)data.
Reusable. (R1) Data should adopt an explicit license for access and usage. (R2) Data provenance should be documented and accessible. (R3) Data and metadata should comply with community standards.
Notably, the Thirty-Thousand Foot View does not aim at assessing whether existing ontologies follow the FAIR principles themselves (as similar effort has been done in previous research [53]). Instead, the analysis investigates if existing ontologies allow to share FAIR streaming data on the Web. The analysis focuses on the ontological level and its (potential) applications. Definition 1 introduces the notion of Web Stream, which is a prerequisite for identifying streams on the Web.
Definition 1.
A Web Stream is an unbounded ordered collection of pairs
Definition 1 captures the double nature of Web Streams, which are both a resource (indeed they are identifiable) but also “contain”, i.e., refer to other resources on the Web. Such a two-fold nature extends to the data and metadata levels. Therefore, we can distinguish between stream-wide and event-wide (meta)data, which relate to the stream resource and its content, respectively [66]. Stream-wide (meta)data contains information about the whole stream, for instance, who is the publisher, or a list of known consumers; on the metadata level, we find the date when the stream was first issued, descriptive statistics about the data or the formats in which the stream is available. Event-wide (meta)data concern each Web resource within the stream. For instance, a resource can refer to a domain-specific entity, which in turn depends on where the stream is originally from (e.g., for an IoT stream monitoring the location of people, an entity can be a given Point of Interest or a person). The role of Event-wide metadata relates to the event order, duration, or location. Notably, a punctuation mechanism that is needed to enable continuous processing is usually based on time. However, it can be generalised to any Boolean predicate related to order that leverages event-wide metadata [68].
4.2.Discussion
Table 3
Summary of the thirty-thousand-foot view, i.e., compliance of the selected ontologies (top) with FAIR principles (left) and our analysis dimensions (left) (terminological level only) legend: ◇ = possible; ✓ = supported;
| FAIR | Dimension | VoCaLS | SAO/CES | LDES | IoTStream | SAREF | SIOC | LODE | ActS | Frappe | SSN/SOSA |
| F1 | Identity (S) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||||
| Identity (E) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||
| F2 | Quality (G) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||||||
| Quality (D) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||||
| Quality (C) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
| Semantics (S) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||||
| Semantics (E) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
| F3 | Identity | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ◇ | ||||||
| Data Model | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
| F4 | Quality (S-I) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||||
| Quality (E-I) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||||
| A1 | Protocols | ✓ | ✓ | ≈ | ✓ | ≈ | ✓ | ||||
| A2 | Identity | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ◇ | ◇ | |||||
| Protocols | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||||
| I1 | Semantics (S) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||||
| Semantics (E) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
| I2 | Referencing | ≈ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||||
| I3 | Referencing | NA | NA | NA | NA | NA | NA | NA | NA | NA | NA |
| R1 | Semantics | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||||||
| R2 | Quality (P) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
| R3 | Data Model | ✓ | ≈ | ✓ | ≈ | ≈ | ≈ |
We now analyze the selected ontologies, w.r.t. the FAIR data principles. While Table 3 summarise the answers to the individual principles, we organize the discussion along the following dimensions by answering the related questions:
D.1 Identity (F1, F3, A2): Is it possible to use IRIs or DOIs to identify the Web Stream and/or the referred resources in ontology X?
VoCaS, LDES, and IoTStream, introduce very similar concepts that lead to instantiating referencable Web Streams. More specifically, VoCaLS includes the notion of voc:Stream specifically to represent an unbounded dataset on the Web; LDES introduces the notion of ldes:EventStream as an append-only collection of immutable elements, and assigns to it a retention policy; Elsaleh et al. include in their IoT Stream ontology the notion of iot:IoTStream. SAO goes one step further, allowing its users to identify the resources within the stream as sao:StreamData or sao:StreamEvent; the two classes distinguish the raw elements from those produced by some analysis. The class sioc:Thread and the more generic sioc:Container refer to a collection of elements. However, they do not explicitly mention an ordering relation between them. Similarly, ActS includes the concept of OrderedCollection that aligns with the Web Stream Conceptualisation, while individual activities represent elements in the collection. Finally, LODE allows only the instantiation of individual events without conceptualizing the Web Stream. Although the presence of a class that aligns with the conceptualization in Definition 1 does not prevent instantiating the stream anonymously (with blank nodes), it allows the FAIR usage with transparent IRIs/DOIs (F1).
D.2 (Meta)Data Semantics (F2, I1, R1): Can the ontology X capture the (meta)data semantics at stream and event level? What formalism was used for the modelling efforts?
Among the selected ontologies, only five have a conceptualization that can be coherently aligned with Web Streams and, thus, allow representing stream-level data. VoCaLS and LDES allow specializing RDF Streams, but they do not specify anything regarding the event-level semantics. On the other hand, SAO/CES, IoTStream, SAREF, and SSN/SOSA focus only on representing data only at the event level, following a commonly accepted ontology design pattern for modelling sensor measurement in RDF based on observations. Also LODE, and Frappe neglect the stream level (as seen before) and focus only on the event-level dimension for data and metadata. Finally, SIOC, ActS are the only two ontologies that can possibly define data at both stream and event level, nonetheless, with some limitations wrt. the conceptualisation of Definition 1.
Regarding metadata, VoCALS supports to descriptive information about the resources, e.g., name and owner, and contextual information, e.g., the vocabulary used to annotate the stream content, as well as stress on the specification of a license (R1). Instead, LDES explicitly supports only contextual metadata as it relies on the TREE specification, which also includes a license (R1). Notably, also SAO/CEO supports licensing via the imported ontology QOI. Although not explicitly declared, the same approach would be possible in SIOC and ActS, as both have a concept that can be aligned to Web Streams. Finally, neither SIOC and ActS, nor SAO/CES, IoTStream, SAREF, and SSN/SOSA do explicitly define event level metadata.
Finally, all the selected ontologies use OWL (Frappe, VoCals, SAREF, SAO/CES, IoTStream, SSN/SOSA) or RDFS (Activity Streams, SIOC) as ontological languages to implement their formalization.
D.3 Data Models (F3, R3) and Adequate Protocols (A1, A2): Can adequate access protocols for streaming (meta)data be defined using ontology X? Are the (meta)data appropriately licensed, and is the licensing specific to the stream? Can (meta) data stream be represented using the RDF data model in ontology X?
All the selected ontologies support and encourage using RDF (Streams) to represent data and metadata (F3). However, not all focus on the stream and event levels. VoCaLS and LDES even explicitly include an RDF Stream specialization of the generic data stream. Although choosing an adequate protocol for sharing (meta)data on the Web usually means HTTP, it does not directly apply to streaming data. Regarding sharing, VoCALS and LDES adopt the convention, introduced initially by Barbieri et al. [13], who suggested sharing the stream metadata in a separate document accessible via HTTP while adopting a more suitable protocol for the stream content (F3, A2). Notably, the same approach would be possible with the SIOC and ActS given that we could find an alignment with the concept of a Web Stream. Finally, except LDES, which inherits the HTTP access assumption from TREE, the other ontologies include a specific abstraction that aims at generalizing access to the streaming data. Still, they do not recommend explicitly any protocols except IoTStream (e.g. RESTful, NGSI-9, MQTT, CoAP etc.), i.e., voc:StreamEndpoint, sioc:Space (is a place where data resides, e.g. on a website, desktop, fileshare, etc.) iots:Service, saref:Service, ces:EventService.
D.4 Data Quality (F2, F4, R2): What dimensions of data quality does ontology X consider?
Among the selected ontologies, only SSN, SAO/CES, and IotStream explicitly focus on data quality by including specific classes and properties. Their modelling is thorough, and it includes all the traditional data quality dimensions like Accuracy, Volatility, and Completeness. For the sake of the analysis, we discuss them as part of a General definition [52], distinguish them from other aspects related to Descriptive and contextual metadata, or traceability, which is another essential dimension of data quality that is explicitly named by FAIR principles (R2) as Provenance.
SSN System Capabilities Module1212 includes several dimensions, e.g., ssn-system:ResponseTime, ssn-system:Frequency, or the conceptualisation of ssn-system:Drift. SAO/CES and IotStream import many dimensions from the Data Quality Ontology QOI ,1313 for example qoi:Accuracy, or qoi:Completeness, or qoi:Jitter.
Moreover, VoCALS, LDES, IoTStream, as well as SIOC, SSN, and ActS (although implicitly), includes classes and properties for describing the streams and linking to contextual resources, e.g., services that can contribute to the quantification of the quality level.
Regarding provenance (R2), all the ontologies, except for LDES, which is not focused on processing, include dedicated classes and properties for tracking the provenance of streaming analysis, i.e., vocals:Task and vocals:Operator for representing queries, ces:StreamAnalysis and ces:EventPattern for aggregations and complex event recognition, for spatio-temporal analyses frappe:Synthetize and frappe:Capture, and saref:Function and iots:Analytics or ssn:Procedure for continuous processing over the observation streams.
Finally, LODE does not support any data quality dimension. At the same time, all the ontologies that allow the usage of explicit identifiers support indexing and searching for URIs.
D.5 FAIR Referencing (I2, I3): Does ontology X provide explicit mechanisms for referencing external (FAIR) resources, such as connecting the stream and its items?
Linking across resources is essential to the Semantic Web and, more generally, interoperability. Also, the FAIR principle encourages this, translating at the ontological level with the explicit possibility of linking to external resources (outside the (meta)data semantics). Not all the ontologies support it explicitly, but only VoCALS allows to connect a given Web Stream with vocabularies, mapping files, and/or ontologies; LDES via the tree:member inherited from TREE, which allows connecting any referentiable resources to the stream or its elements; ActS, with the class Link that is meant to be an indirect reference to another resource, and finally LODE, which includes two properties: involved and involvedAgent, that aimed at representing any physical, social, mental object or an agent involved in an event.
Unfortunately, there is no way to verify whether the linked resources follow the FAIR principles by only looking at the ontological level. However, if we only limit our indirect assessment to the selected ontologies, any interlinked Stream that reuses a combination of the selected one would be FAIR.
Listing 1.
Combination of VoCALS with SAO and SSN ontologies to increase FAIR coverage. Prefixes omitted
It is important to note that every ontology does not need to cover all aspects. It is possible to combine ontologies with different capabilities to obtain complete coverage. A combination of VoCALS with SAO and SSN was already explored in the original VoCaLS paper [63] and is reintroduced in Listing 1. We utilized the SOSA/SSN vocabularies to represent the source device and the observation data it produces, and SOA to describe information about the output of a stream observation, in addition to capturing the stream and streaming services metadata. The listing reflects an interpretation of Table 3, which shows that the combination of VoCaLS with complementary ontologies such as SOA or IoTStream can increase the FAIRness of the streams.
4.3.Best practices
From our discussion emerges a clear need for greater emphasis on adhering to the FAIR principles and addressing the challenges specific to stream reasoning, ensuring that data streams are not only analyzed in real-time but are also readily discoverable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable for both current and future research and applications.
When modelling an ontology for SLD, the primary goal should be to maximize FAIR coverage. The rapid development of SLD technologies has led to overlook these aspects. Indeed, it’s not uncommon for a single ontology in this domain to fall short of meeting all the FAIR principles comprehensively (see Table 3). In such cases, it’s advisable to pursue a strategy of combining multiple ontologies to bridge these gaps and maximize FAIR coverage collectively, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of stream reasoning systems.
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5.Ten-thousand foot view: Streams’ structure
Fig. 5.
Streaming Linked Data abstractions.
The Ten-thousand Foot View focuses on the ontological level and analyses the nature and nurture of the conceptualization of the selected ontologies used for representing streaming data within a given domain.
RQ
According to our Thirty-Thousand Foot View analysis (see Table 3), only eight of the ten selected ontologies describe concepts to represent the streaming data at the event level. These eight ontologies include SSN/SOSA, SAREF, IoTStream, SIOC, LODE, ActS, Frappe, and SAO/CES. The other ontologies are not included in this discussion.
5.1.Analysis framework
In the related literature [3,31,49], dynamic data are typically divided into two kinds of abstractions, i.e., unbounded time-ordered data a.k.a. streams and Time-varying ones. Arasu et al. [3] introduced such data dichotomy to the extent of formalizing relational Continuous Queries. Dell’Aglio et al. [30] extended it later on for RSP. In this work, we focus on SLD and, thus, RDF Streams (see Definition 2).
Definition 2.
An RDF Stream is a Web Stream such that o is an RDF object, i.e., an RDF graph, a quad, or a triple, and
SLD focuses on query answering over RDF Streams, i.e., Continuous Computations (see Definition 3) that assume the form of Continuous Queries (CQ), which are a special class of queries that listen to updates and allow interested users to receive new results as soon as data becomes available.
Definition 3.
Continuous Computations proceed under continuous semantics, i.e., they output an infinite stream while consuming one or more infinite streams as inputs.
On the other hand, Time-varying abstractions represent the result of Continuous Computations and, as the term suggests, capture the changes that occur to data as a function of time. Definition 4 formalizes the notion and specializes the definition.
Definition 4.
Time-varying Abstractions (TVA) are functions that map the temporal domain to finite entity sets that relate to a given abstraction
In particular, a Time-varying RDF Graph is a function
Many extensions of SPARQL exist [31] to perform Continuous Queries over RDF Streams, and the RSP-QL [30] reference model aims at unifying the formal semantics of existing SPARQL extensions. Its abstraction can be found in Fig. 5. A common aspect of these languages is the notion of windowing, which allows to perform stateful computation over a stream. Window Operators, a.k.a. Stream-to-Relation (S2R) operators, chunk the stream into finite portions where computations can terminate. Once windows are applied, operators that involve Time-varying abstractions can be traced back to their original version that is applicable to static data (R2R). Finally, an operator’s class that transform back Time-varying data into streams is called Relation-to-Stream (R2S). According to RSP-QL, a Time-varying RDF Graph results from applying a window operator over a stream.
Last but not least, static data co-exist with both streaming and Time-varying ones. Indeed, stream enrichment with contextual static knowledge is a popular task in SR/RSP [49].
5.2.Discussion
Table 4
Summary of the ten-thousand foot view analysis
| Ontology | Instantaneous (L1) | Static (L2) | Time agnostic (L3) | Time-varying (L4) | Continuous (L5) |
| SSN/SOSA | Observation, result | Sensor, platform, | ObservableProp., measure | Actuation, result | Procedure |
| SAREF | Measurement | Device | Property, UnitOfMeasure | State | Function |
| IoT Stream | Observation | Sensor, service, platform | Quality, unit, QuantityKind | Event | Analytics |
| SIOC | Item, post | User, space | Role | Container | |
| LODE | Event | ||||
| ActS | Activity | Actor | Link | Collection | |
| Frappe | Event | Cell, grid, place | Pixel, frame | Capture, synthetize | |
| SAO/CES | StreamData, point | Service, sensor | Segment, StreamEvent | Stream analysis | |
| VoCaLS | Stream, RDF Stream | SDS, TimeVaryingGraph | Task operator |
Fig. 6.
Decision diagram for assigning the meta-structure in the ten-thousand foot view. Red arrow is “no”, green arrow is “yes”.
In this section, we elicit the data dichotomy explained above to study the meta-conceptualization of the selected ontologies that model concepts that align with the meta-conceptualization described above. For this reason, LDES is not taken into account in this discussion.
An ontology used for SR typically consists of five levels, i.e., L1 the instantaneous level identifies the part of the ontology directly associated with a temporal annotation. Entities of this kind occur in the stream. L2 the static level of the ontology identifies those concepts that may have a temporal annotation, but that are assumed to not change while the Continuous Computation occurs. This level is relevant for the stream enrichment task [49]. For the sake of completeness, we also include a time-agnostic level L3, which identifies those ground terms independent of time. L4 the Time-varying level includes entities whose state evolves. Entities of this kind are typically the result of a Continuous Computation, e.g., an aggregation. Last but not least, we include the continuous level L5 to identify those terms that combine other terms and return Time-varying entities as a result of processing. Entities of this kind typically include continuous transformations or queries. Notably, we leave a deeper investigation of L5 as future work due to the lack of space.
The detailed analysis of the selected ontologies is presented below and summarized in Table 4.
The decision diagram in Fig. 6 is structured to guide knowledge workers operating within the SLD context at the Ten-Thousand Foot View. The diagram helps determining the classification of ontology concepts based on time. For instance, if one is determining if “time is part of the conceptualization,” and the answer is “no,” then the concept is “Time Agnostic.” If the answer is “yes,” further decisions based on “occurrence”, “endurance,” and “change” lead to the classification of the concept into one of the other levels. The diagram provides a structured approach to categorizing ontology concepts by their relationship with time, which aligns with Definitions 2, 3, 4, and the general notion of time presented in Section 2.
Instantaneous (L1). There is a clear agreement between the IoT ontologies (SSN, SOSA, and IoTStream) which identify the sosa:Observation on their instantaneous level. SAREF’s conceptualization is slightly different as srf:Measurement already includes the unit of measure. On the other hand, SAO/CES adopt a generic data item using the classes sao:StreamData and sao:Point. SIOC and ActS present a small hierarchy of concepts, i.e., sioc:Post, sioc:Item, and as:Activity that capture the interaction with social networks (or general Web interactions). Frappe and LODE adopt the concept of Event, which both align with the Event Ontology.
Static (L2). Also for the static level, the IoT ontologies share a similar conceptualization, i.e., Device, Sensors, and Platforms are entities that are assumed to be static when the analysis occurs. Frappe’s static part includes concepts for representing spatial information. ActS’ static part is limited to the as:Actor class and its sub-classes. SIOC’s static part relates to Users and Spaces that represent online communities’ population and logical location. LODE does not include concepts at L2. VoCaLS includes Stream and RDFStream as static concepts. They are meant to represent streams as resources (to be continuously consumed).
Time Agnostic (L3). Neither Frappe nor SAO/CEO, initially designed for SR/RSP applications, directly include L3 concepts. On the other hand, IoT ontologies include concepts that do not directly have a temporal dimension. Such entities are related to the properties observed from the sensors and the unit of measurement. While LODE does not include concepts at L3, SIOC and ActS respectively have only one, i.e., sioc:Role that represent the role of a sioc:User on a sioc:Space and as:Link that represent a generic connection between two resources.
Time Varying (L4) and Continuous (L5). Except for LODE all the selected ontologies present a Time-varying part. On the other hand, L5 remains uncovered by LODE, SIOC, and ActS.
Interestingly, L4 is where the selected ontologies differ the most. SSN/SOSA distinguish between the ssn:Result of a ssn:Procedure, and the action taken after processing, i.e. a ssn:Actuation. SAREF represents Continuous Computations as Functions that aggregates :Measurements to modify a srf:Device’s srf:State. IoTStream’s continuous part is called an iots:Analytics and produces iots:Events as Time-varying entities. SAO/CES include the class sao:StreamAnalysis too. However, the result can be either a sao:StreamEvent or a sao:Segment, which is just a portion of the stream. Frappe includes a Time-varying corresponding entity for both the static entities frp:Grid and frp:Cell, i.e., frp:Frame and frp:Pixel. As briefly mentioned, it also represents continuous entities, i.e., frp:Capture and frp:Synthesize. Last but not least, VoCaLS includes two entities inspired by RSP-QL [30], i.e., TimeVaryingGraph that represents the Time-varying equivalent of an RDF Graph, and SDS, which is a collection of TimeVaryingGraphs. Moreover, VoCaLs explicitly mentions continuous transformations, i.e., Task and Operator. The former is meant to generalize Continuous Queries, while the latter helps tracking provenance by representing the task internals.
We can see that most ontologies distribute their complexity across different temporal levels, facilitating the alignment with SR applications.
5.3.Reasoning capabilities
The selected ontologies include complex concepts requiring definition consisting of expressive language constructs. Such constructs have, in turn, an impact on the expressivity of the including ontology. In the following, we discuss these nuances focusing on how they related to our meta-structure (see Fig. 6). Moreover, we discuss opportunities for reasoning optimizations. Table 5 summarises the expressivity of each ontology in terms of minimum OWL2 Profile and Description Logic (DL).1414 Notably, most ontologies requires very expressive languages, i.e. OWL2 DL Profile, to be fully interpreted. The mismatch between the high complexity of the reasoning algorithms required to interpret these ontologies and the frequency at which data is updated in SR applications [14], makes these ontologies ill-suited for SR applications at first glance. For the ontologies with import statements, i.e., Frappe and VoCALS, we distinguish between the core ontology’s expressivity with and without its imported ontologies. We can see that both ontologies owe their high expressivity to their imported ontologies, as their concept definitions are much lower in expressivity.
Table 5
Ontology expressivity in terms of OWL2 profile and description logic
| Ontology | OWL2 Profile | Description logic |
| SOSA | OWL2 RL, QL | ALI(D) |
| SSN | OWL2 DL | ALRIN(D) |
| SAREF | OWL2 DL | ALCIQ(D) |
| IoT Stream | OWL2 DL | ALCHI(D) |
| SIOC | OWL2 DL | SHI(D) |
| LODE | OWL2 DL | ALHF |
| ActS | OWL2 DL | ALCHN(D) |
| Frappe | OWL2 DL | SROIN(D) |
| Frappe | OWL2 QL | ALI(D) |
| SAO | OWL2 RL | ALH(D) |
| CES | OWL2 RL | ALH(D) |
| VoCALS | OWL2 DL | SRIN(D) |
| VoCALS | OWL2 EL, QL, RL | ALH |
We now zoom deeper into various complex definitions and their structural relation to SR tasks. As the goal in SR applications is to reason upon the events in the stream and combine them with other contextual data, we investigate complex concept definitions that span across levels (L1-L5), stressing in particular on L1. We define complex concept definition in DL notation, i.e.
We focus on reasoning on instance level (ABox), through definitions defined across the five ontology meta-structures. We differentiate between complex definitions using either existential in the subclass definition (i.e. B) or universal quantification in the superclass definition (i.e. H). For example,
We identified four interesting reasoning perspectives based on the position of L1 in the complex definitions, i.e. either in B or H. With Other we denote all other levels, except L1. Table 6 summarizes the identified reasoning perspectives for each ontology.
Table 6
Various reasoning classes that influence an ontologies SR abilities. (U = universal, E = existential, ED = domain/range existential
| Ontology | Reasoning perspective | |||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| SOSA | - | - | - | - |
| SSN | U | U | U | U |
| SAUEF | U, ED | U, ED | U | U, ED |
| EoT Stream | U, ED | U, ED | - | U, ED |
| SEOC | ED | ED | - | ED |
| LODE | - | - | - | - |
| ActS | ED | ED | U | U |
| Frappe | ED | ED | - | - |
| SAO/CES | U, ED | ED | - | ED |
| VoCALS | - | - | - | ED |
Perspective 1 (
– Existential: This kind of definition implies that the events in the stream influence the classification of the data defined outside of L1. None of the ontologies have predefined definitions in this perspective, except for object property domain and range definitions. For example, SAREF defines Device (L2) as the domain of the property (makesMeasurement), which has Measurement (L1) as a range (
– Universal: many ontologies use universal quantification to define restrictions that span L1 into either L2 or L3. For example, SSN restricts an Observation (L1) as something that can only be made by a Sensor (L2). (
Efficiency: Reasoning about the existential definitions in this perspective is non-trivial as the reasoning task requires reclassifying the more static data based on the content of the stream. Reasoning on the universal restrictions is more efficient as it can be optimised by materializing the more static data, such that the restrictions on the events in the streams can be computed by linking the event to the materialized static data and computing the consistency only of the instances defined in the event itself. This is similar to the idea of SubSet Reasoning [16] where a subset of the materialized data is extracted to reason upon the data in the stream.
Perspective 2 (
– Existential: None of the ontologies have definitions in this perspective, except for object property domain and range definitions. For example, SAREF defines Measurement (L1) as the domain of the property measurementMadeBy, which has Device (L2) as a range. However, we see that most of this perspective is defined directly in the application logic that builds on these ontologies. For example, the CityPulse project [54] defines ASP rules in this perspective, while [14] defines a CO2Observation as an Observation (L1) that is observed By a Sensor (L2) that observes the Property (L3) CO2. (
– Universal: Mostly the IoT ontologies use universal quantifications to define restrictions in this perspective. For example, SSN defines that a Sensor (L2) can only make observations of the type Observation (L1) (
– Efficiency: the existential quantifiers in this perspective allow to materialize the more static data and perform the reasoning on a restricted set of data around what is defined in the event [16] or try to cache the reasoning steps that are needed to reasoning on the event data [14].
Perspective 3 (
– Existential: None of the ontologies have definitions with existential quantifiers in this perspective, however, as an example, we could imagine an application extension of SIOC that defines AcademicPosts as Posts (L1) that describes a certain topic as the literal “academic”.
– Universal: Most of the IoT ontologies have again definitions in this perspective, e.g. SSN defines a Observation (L1) as something that only has instances of the type Results (L1) as result (
– Efficiency: This perspective is efficient in terms of reasoning as it does not require any interaction with the more static data defined outside of L1.
Perspective 4 (
– Existential: Again none of the ontologies have predefined definitions in this perspective. However, we can again find examples in the application logic of certain projects. [27] defines a TemperatureSensor (L2) as a Sensor (L2) that observes the Property Temperature (L3) (
– Universal: Similar to Perspective 3, many of the IoT ontologies use universal quantifiers to define restrictions for this perspective. For example, SSN defines a Sensor (L2) as something that can only observe Observable- Properies (L3)
(
– Efficiency: This perspective can be precomputed as reasoning can happen independent of the events in the stream.
So even though most ontologies were very expressive at first glance, they mainly use this expressivity to define restrictions on the various concepts, while the inference tasks are typically reserved for application specific logic.
5.4.Best practice
At this level of analysis, we recommend to follow four valuable lessons to enhance the effectiveness of data processing. Firstly, practitioners shall carefully examine the expressivity of imported ontologies and striving to limit their complexity, ensuring that the ontologies utilized align closely with the specific requirements of their applications. Indeed, we observed that despite the attempt of keeping the ontology profile down to OWL 2 QL, resolving all the imports causes the overall profile to be much more complex (OWL 2 DL). Secondly, it is advisable to maintain a low reasoning expressivity when defining the concepts related to events. Recent results on hierarchical reasoning show how SLD applications could benefit by limiting to such modelling practice [18], which also helps streamline the processing of streaming data by avoiding unnecessary complexity in stream reasoning tasks. Furthermore, it’s essential to avoid Reasoning Perspective 1, where event data significantly influence the classification of more static data. This approach can be challenging to optimize and may lead to inefficiencies in data handling [16]. When selecting ontologies for integration in the stream reasoning context, aim for those that exhibit clear differentiation in their meta-structure (see Fig. 6), as identifying the change frequency of instances based on their assigned concepts allows to optimize the processing. Indeed, differentiation allows to avoid redundancy and promote effective knowledge representation and data integration within this dynamic and evolving domain [40].
By heeding these lessons, the field of SLD can better manage the intricacies that occur when modelling a domain that presents streaming data and continuous information needs.
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6.Thousand foot view: Streams’ content
The Thousand Foot View of SLD focuses on the stream’s internals. In particular, we study the notion of Ontology Kernel (see Definition 5), and how the selected ontologies implement it. We reuse the ontologies introduced in the Ten-Thousand Foot View. Only eight of the ten selected ontologies describe concepts to represent the stream’s internals. These eight ontologies include SSN/SOSA, SAREF, IoTStream, SIOC, LODE, ActS, Frappe, and SAO/CES. The other ontologies are not included in this discussion.
RQ
6.1.Analysis framework
Fig. 7.
Kernel structure.
The Common Event Model (CEM) was initially proposed by Westermann and Jain for multimedia applications [72]. CEM is designed for historical event analytics. Thus, it does not relate to L4 and L5. When porting CEM to SR/RSP, we must reinterpret some aspects. Traditionally, data streams are characterized by a form of punctuation that allows streaming operators to iterate over an unbounded sequence of data [68]. In SR/RSP, punctuation relates to the stream shapes, e.g., Graph, Triple, Predicate, as well as with the notion of Event Types [31]. At the ontological level, this reflects on the levels of conceptualization, especially L1. Thus, we introduce the following notion:
Definition 5.
An Ontology Kernel is the minimal set of classes and properties of a certain ontology used to represent the instantaneous level.
Our analysis highlights the relation between the Kernel and the meta-conceptualisation levels (cf. Section 5). Figure 7 depicts such relation enumerating the levels across the CEM dimensions, which are:
Informational: the data and metadata that describe the event, e.g. the event type and other entities involved in the event.
Experiential: the data and metadata that link the event with the transporting media, e.g., images, sensor measurements, or audio snippets.
Spatial: data and metadata that describes where the event occurred. Spatial metadata are further organized in conceptual (e.g., a building), logical (e.g. an address), and physical definitions (e.g. coordinates).
Temporal: metadata that describe when the events occurred. Like the spatial dimension, the conceptual (e.g., time instants), logical (e.g., relative time), and physical (e.g. a UNIX timestamp) distinction applies. Moreover, CEM distinguishes between point-based and interval-based time semantics.
Structural: data and metadata about the event’s structure, e.g., how they are aggregated and linked to each other. As RDF is being used to model the event, we identify four event structures based on query shapes, i.e., Stars, Cycles, Chains, and Trees, as visualized in Fig. 8. Note that ontologies allow to model events using multiple shapes.
Composition: Allows the event model to compose the events into a larger whole, e.g. a smoke and high temperature observation observed in the same room could be composed into a fire observation. We do not consider the composition or aggregation of events at the event modelling level, as SR allows to define compositions or aggregations at higher levels of abstraction [64].
Causal: data and metadata that describe what caused the event and how. Notably, causality is a form of provenance that in SR is typically described at query level. Coherently with the assumption to leave processing as future work, we do not include it in the analysis.
Fig. 8.
Overview of the RDF event shapes.
6.2.Discussion
Table 7
Overview of ontology kernel analysis for informational and experiential information
| Level 1 | Level 2 | |||
| Ontology | Informational | Experiential | Informational | Experiential |
| SSN | Observation + restrictions | Sensor values | Sensors, systems, properties. + restrictions. | None |
| SOSA | Observation | Sensor values | Same as SSN | None |
| IoT Stream | (Stream)Observation, event | Sensor values | Same as SOSA, + IotStreams | None |
| SAREF core | Measurement + hierarchy + restrictions | Sensor values | Device, property + hierarchy + restrictions | Device: model and manufacturer |
| SIOC | Item/post + hierarchy(flat) | Post content: literal, attached file: URI. | User, UserGroup + hierarchy (flat) | Containers: size; users: name and avatar |
| LODE | Event | None | Objects, agents. | None |
| ActS | Activity + hierarchy | Name, content, summary | Objects, links + hierarchy | Objects: name, content and summary. |
| Frappe | Event | Event metadata | Place, Grid-Cell | Place: location metadata |
| SAO | Observation, StreamEvent | Sensor values, Stream analysis | Same as SSN, + StreamAnalysis | Stream analysis: model parameters |
We now align each of the ontologies with the CEM: We distinguish the Informational and Experiential discussion over the two levels L1 and L2. The higher the level, the further away from the core. L1 is one property link away from the core, e.g. a type assertion and linked entities, while L2 requires two hops, e.g. types of the linked entities of L2 or additional entities) We provide a summary of the analysis for the Informational and Experiential discussion in Table 7 and for the Spatial and Temporal discussion in Table 8.
Informational. On L1, the ontologies describe the types of the events. For the sensor ontologies (SSN, SOSA, and IoTStream) the types of the events are sosa:Observations, with the extension of iots:StreamObservation for IoTStream. These ontologies are very generic, it is the responsibility of the user to further specify the Observation types, e.g. to add specific Observations such as a TemperatureObservation to the ontology. SAREF describes srf:Measurements instead of sosa:Observations and already provides a number of specific types in a form of a hierarchy. Both SSN and SAREF specify a number of ontological restrictions that can be enforced by the reasoners, e.g. each sosa:Observation should be made by exactly one sosa:Sensor. SOSA is more lightweight as it does not contain any restrictions. SIOC describes sioc:Items and sioc:Posts as the event types, a shallow hierarchy, and no type restrictions are defined. In LODE, lode:Event is the central event type, no event hierarchies or type restrictions are included. as:Activities represent the main types in the ActS ontology. It defines a hierarchy of as:Activities and a small number of restrictions for some activity subtypes. Frappe imports eo:Event from the Event Ontology as event types with neither hierarchies nor restrictions. We see that L1 Informational type definitions are mostly very simple, except for SSN and SAREF. SSN has its lightweight version SOSA to make the modelling of the events more simple. The fact that the event description is rather simple in ontological complexity is in line with the Cascading Reasoning principle in SR that states that high-velocity streams should be processed with simple processing techniques, while once the streams have been filtered, more advanced processing can be performed using more expressive reasoning techniques [19]. Next to the event Types, L1 also links to the Entities that are involved in the event.
Table 8
Overview of ontology kernel analysis for spatial and temporal information
Ontology Spatial Temporal SSN No support Point (xsd:dateTime); interval (time:TemporalEntity) SOSA Same as SSN Same as SSN IoT Stream Physical locations (geo:Point). Same as SSN self defined interval (xsd:dateTimeStamp) SAREF core No support Point (xsd:dateTime) interval (time:TemporalEntity) SIOC Logical Point LODE Conceptual (dul:Place) physical (geo:SpatialThing) Point and interval (time:TemporalEntity). ActS Physical (lode:Place) logical (lode:Place) Self defined interval (xsd:dateTime) Frappe Pyshical (geosparql:SpatialObject) conceptual (geosparql:SpatialObject) Point-semantics (time:Instant); self defined interval (xsd:dateTime). SAO Physical (geo:SpatialThing) conceptual (geo:SpatialThing) Same as SSN + point and interval (TimeLine Ontology) On L2, informational data include the types of the L1 linked Entities which describe the Static level of the ontology. In particular, the IoT ontologies (SSN, SOSA, IoTStream, and SAO) link the sosa:Observations to sosa:Sensors that made the observations and sosa:ObservableProperties that have been observed. IotStream has the additional iots:IotStream concept that iots:StreamObservations can belong to, while SAO links to the specific sao:Stream Analysis that was executed to extract the iots:StreamEvent from the sosa:Observations. SAREF links its srf:Measurements to srf:Devices (instead of Sensors) and the observed Properties. In SIOC, on an Informational L2, sioc:Items and sioc:Posts are linked to the involved sioc:Users or sioc:UserGroups. In LODE, the lode:Events are linked to the involved lode:Objects and lode:Actors in a very generic way. as:Activities in ActS can be linked on an Informational L2 to the involved as:Objects and as:Links. In Frappe, the eo:Events are linked to frp:Places they are happening in. The ontological complexity of L2 is in line with L1, i.e., SSN and SAREF define restrictions, while SAREF, SIOC, and ActS define hierarchies of concepts.
Note that many of the classes of Informational L1 align with the Instantaneous level of the Ten-Thousand Foot View even though these are two different ways of looking at the classes of the ontologies. In the previous, view we looked at the classes that had a temporal annotation, while in this view we look at the classes used for modelling the events. They align as the events themselves are what change over time.
Experiential. On L1, experiential data are the event payload. The sensor ontologies (SSN, SOSA, IoTStream, SAO, and SAREF) describe sensor values. SIOC describes the post content and ActS describes the name, summary, and content (as HTML) of the activity. Frappe and LODE do not support experiential properties. On L2, experiential data are the static entities’ metadata. SAREF allows its srf:Devices to have properties that can uniquely characterize it, namely its model and manufacturer. In SIOC sioc:Users and sioc:UserGroups can maintain metadata about their size, while users can have a name and avatar. In ActS, as:Objects can have all sorts of metadata such as name, content, and summary. All other ontologies do not support experiential L2 properties out of the box.
Temporal. SSN/SOSA defines two temporal concepts, i.e. sosa:resultTime and sosa:phenomenonTime. The data property sosa:resultTime has xsd:dateTime as range and provides point-semantics. The object property sosa:phenomenonTime is more expressive and allows to model both interval and point semantics through the use of time:TemporalEntity. In IotStream, the class iots:StreamObservation defines the interval of the window it belongs to using the data properties iots:windowStart and iots:windowEnd (with range xsd:dateTimeStamp). SAO allows the use of the TimeLine Ontology for both interval and point semantics for the extracted soa:StreamEvents. In SAREF, srf:Measurements can have point-semantics using the data property srf:hasTimestamp (with range xsd: dateTime), while srf:Properties can have both point and interval semantics using the object property srf:hasTime (with range time:TemporalEntity). In SIOC, sioc:Posts can be annotated using point-semantics using dcterms:created and dcterms:modified with a literal using ISO-8601 formatted date values. In LODE, the lode:Events can be time-stamped both with point as interval semantics with the lode:atTime object property with time:TemporalEntity as domain that can model both point and interval semantics. In ActS, interval-based time semantics are supported using data properties as:startTime and as:endTime (with xsd:dateTime as range). In Frappe, eo:Events have point-based time semantics using the property frp:time with time:Instant as range.
Interestingly, we see that most ontology models rely on xsd:dateTime for point-semantics, while for interval-semantics, there does not seem to be a consensus. Some vocabularies chose to model their own intervals, e.g. startTime & endTime, while others rely on time:TemporalEntity.
Spatial. For the spatial definition, we make a distinction between physical, conceptual, and logical definitions. SSN, SOSA, and SAREF have no out-of-the-box support for spatial definitions. In IoTStream, the iots:IotStreams have physical locations defined through geo:location (with geo:Point as range). SOA allows modelling the location of Features of Interest that are being observed using geo:SpatialThing. In SIOC, logical locations are supported, i.e. sioc:Sites can be the location of an online community and a sioc:Space is defined as being a place where data resides. In LODE, lode:Events can have conceptual locations using lode:atPlace (with dul:Place as range) or physical locations using lode:inSpace (with geo:SpatialThing as a range). In ActS, as:Activities can have both physical and logical definitions through the definition of the as:Place object. In Frappe, eo:Events can have both physical and conceptual locations defined through location (with frp:Place as range, which is a subclass of geosparql:SpatialObject). Note that geosparql:SpatialObject can define both physical and conceptual locations. We saw that physical spatial definitions typically rely on the geo and geosparql imported ontologies, while conceptual locations on DUL and geosparql.
Structural. Figure 9 shows an example of the SOSA ontology, where both Chain, Stars, Cycles, and Trees can be used. However, we saw in the literature that the Star is most often used. The same holds for SSN, IoTStream, and SAREF. Other ontologies model both Chain, Stars, and Trees. However, the Star seems to be the best suited for streaming purposes. Indeed, when going up in ontology structure levels (e.g. Informational L2) data becomes more static, and as the event itself is typically kept limited in size, the more static data is not described in the event itself but linked through informational L1 (Entities).
Chains are not particularly useful as they only allow to move from the core of the kernel to the outer level through Informational Entity relations. At the end of the chain, there can optionally be only Informational Type or Experiential data, as these data end the chain. Cycles share the same faith, as they only allow to cycle through Informational Entity relations, without any Experiential or Type data, as these data end the cycle. Trees can model all data, but tend to describe unnecessary static data. Stars can model Informational L1, both the type of the event itself and the linked Entities, while describing the data in the Experiential L1, making it ideal for event modelling. Table 9 and 10 summarize the analysis.
Fig. 9.
Mapping of the RDF structures on the event kernel using the SOSA ontology.
Table 9
Structural analysis vs query shapes
Ontology Star Snowflake Chain Tree Cycle SSN ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ SOSA ✓ ✓ ✓ IoT Stream ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ SAREF core ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ SIOC ✓ ✓ ✓ LODE ✓ ✓ ✓ ActS ✓ ✓ ✓ Frappe ✓ ✓ ✓ SAO ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ Table 10
RDF shapes alignment with the kernel and ontology levels
Chain Star Cycle Tree L1: informational(type) ✓ ✓ L1: informational(entity) ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ L1: experiential ✓ ✓ L2: informational(type) ✓ ✓ L2: informational(entity) ✓ ✓ L2: experiential ✓ ✓ Understanding the structure of the events is important as it opens many opportunities for optimizations, as it allows to clarify how a query can optimally interact with the events. For example, Stars could be represented as a table (instead of an RDF graph) allowing part of the querying to be offloaded to lower-level processing techniques that operate before the conversion to RDF which can improve performance [11]. Fernandez et al. [33] showed that identifying regularities in the structure of the data in the stream allows to improve transmission by structure-tailored compression techniques. Furthermore, Bonte et al. [15] showed that understanding the structure of the events in the stream allows to optimize the continuous query evaluation process. These kinds of optimizations then on their own can lead to better modelling guidelines for SLD ontologies.
Composition. Most ontologies allow some sort of composition through logical reasoning between the kernel and data that is modeled outside of the kernel, as discussed in Section 5.3. However, it is worth noting that some ontologies allow to define compositions that go beyond traditional logical reasoning. SOA/CES allows to define temporal patterns through the Complex Event Processing (CEP) definitions supported by the CES ontology. These CEP definitions allow defining the composition of various events that have a temporal dependency. Frappe allows compositions by defining aggregations on the captured data through statistical inference. Similarly, IoTStream allows to define how different Analytics have been computed on the data stream that also allows some sort of statistical inference to perform composition over various events. SAO has similar functionality through its StreamAnalysis concept, and even predefines a number of analyses, among others KMeans, MovingAverage and DiscreteCosineTransform.
6.3.Best practices
Finally, at the lowest level of our analysis, we share several key lessons that have emerged. To promote streamlined processing in real-time environments, it is advised to keep the core kernel of the data model as concise as possible or at least limit the expressiveness of the ontological fragment that it uses. Indeed, the more properties constitute the kernel, the higher the risk for encountering unexpected dependencies with static knowledge (see Perspectives in Section 5.3). Additionally, the adoption of event structures that can be easily translated into simpler representations, such as the Star model, can be optimised for matching independently from the window [45]. When incorporating temporal information, adhering to widely accepted temporal concepts like time:TemporalEntity fosters uniformity and bolsters interoperability. Likewise, for spatial information, the reuse of established concepts from ontologies like “geo” or “geosparql” is favored over introducing custom location-specific terms, contributing to more standardized and compatible data representations. Indeed, we notice high diversity across the adopted spatio-temporal concepts. However, having a shared and agreed-upon conceptualisation of space and time is an essential aspect of SLD applications.
These lessons collectively advance the field of SLD, enabling more effective management and utilization of dynamic and evolving datasets.
BP
BP
BP
BP
7.Related surveys
Dell’Aglio et al. [31] recently surveyed the state-of-the-art of stream reasoning research. They initially identified 9 requirements for a stream reasoning system to satisfy, then they analyzed the compliance of existing works to them. Although the authors discuss streaming annotation, which is comparable to our Thirty-Thousand Foot View, they do not explicitly compare ontologies themselves.
Margara et al. [49] also surveyed solutions for stream reasoning and RDF stream processing. The focus of this survey was on comparing system capabilities and identifying limitations in terms of RDF stream processing. Although related to potential future work, we did not include processing in this current work. Thus, this survey can be seen as complementary.
In the context of the Semantic Web for the Internet of Things, the work of Szilagy et al. [60] is related. The authors discuss the advantages of semantic annotation for solving interoperability issues in the IoT domain. Then, they propose a specialized version of the Semantic Web stack for IoT. Although Szilagy et al. propose to compare four ontologies, including SSN, the comparison is not the main focus of their work. Moreover, the analysis’s scope is limited to IoT and does not include ontologies like SIOC and LODE.
Finally, Gyrard et al. [36] describe a Linked Open Vocabulary (LOV) for IoT projects (LOV4IoT). LOV4IoT identified existing IoT ontologies, re-engineered the vocabularies to make them interoperable, and cataloged them. However, they did not investigate each of the ontologies’ capabilities for modelling data streams and LOV4IoT is limited to IoT applications.
8.Conclusion
In this paper, we surveyed the work on KR for SLD. In particular, we presented 1) a Thirty-Thousand Foot View observing streams as Web resources, 2) a Ten-Thousand Foot View that observes the nature and nurture of the ontologies for streaming data starting from a bottom-up approach, and 3) a Thousand Foot View, which zooms further in and discusses how different ontologies model the events in the stream. Our analysis can be summarised as follows:
From thirty-thousand foot, most Stream description ontologies do not completely adhere to the FAIR principle. However, a combination of VoCALS and SAO/IoTStream fulfills most of the requirements. From Ten-thousand foot, ontologies distributed their complexity alongside five time-related dimensions, i.e., Instantaneous (L1), Static (L2), Time Agnostic (L3), Time-varying (L4), and Continuous (L5). The L4 is where most differences can be spotted. Most interestingly, ontologies explicitly designed for SLD ignore L3 and elaborate on L5. Finally, from a thousand foot we noticed that a little semantic goes a long fast way. Ontologies keep their kernel small under the assumption that the further away from the kernel, the more static the data. Additionally, while there is no consensus on how time is represented, a star-shaped event is the most prominent one.
As not all ontologies cover all aspects and different views, to be compliant with the SLD principles, a combination of SR ontologies is recommended.
As future work, we plan to extend the analysis to include a Five-Hundred Foot View and a Hundred Foot View that respectively observe how (RDF) streams are serialized (data formats) and served (protocols). Furthermore, we aim to zoom in further on the processing part, i.e. L5 of the Ten-Thousand Foot View and the Causal dimension of the Thousand Foot View.
Our analysis introduced a number of reasoning perspectives, which opens opportunities to design an ontology profile that opens the possibilities for various reasoning optimization that can be identified by the different perspectives. Our analysis frameworks also open various directions in terms of optimized processing. For example, the Ten-Thousand-Foot View opens optimizations by explicitly defining the interaction between the data in the stream (instantaneous level) and more slowly changing data. Similarly, the Thousand Foot View opens optimizations by identifying the different shapes of events. In terms of knowledge representation, we have identified opportunities to define ontology metrics for SLD ontologies, starting from our analysis frameworks.
Most importantly, our analysis frameworks can aid to evaluate future ontologies for SLD and serve as a guideline for high-quality knowledge representation.
Notes
14 We refer the reader to Baader et al. [5] for a complete introduction to DLs, as it is out-of-scope for this paper.
15 Both Symptom and Temperature ValueDeviation are application specific and not part of the SSN ontology.
Acknowledgements
This work was partly funded by Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) (1266521N). R. Tommasini is supported by the French Research Agency under grant agreement nr. ANR-22-CE23-0001 Polyflow.
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